That comparison between Beta and VHS is most interesting. Beta was superior technology wise but lost to marketing. Who cares what is better? By the way I worked for Ampex, who invented video recording. We licensed Sony and JVC (and all the rest) to build VCR’s or VTR’s (video tape recorders) as we called the commercial variety. We won regardless of what the other players did! :)

>Interesting comments. It's interesting to me to me the history of someone from a development company and compare it to my own history, someone involved in corporate development.
>
>Obviously, you have the experience to be able to talk intelligently about the topic. I could be wrong, but I think the cause of some folks to speak the "Rah, Rah" chants for other tools, is that there are some folks here who do not have the experience to talk about these other topics. Yet, they want to deny that there are any acceptable alternatives to VFP.
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>Unfortunately, history is littered with products that gained some market share, had a group of users that firmly believed in the product, yet disappeared. Much like folks who had a ton of Beta tapes, yet were forced to switch to VHS, some people are going to have to start anew with another software development tool.
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>I don't know how you've come up to speed on the various tools you've used. But I would assume it's a combination of hiring knowledgable people and your own studying. In my position, I have to rely on a company to offer me training and myself. Luckily, I'm in a position of working with a team of very talented programmers who are willing to learn together. And we are very high on the team concept.
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>I was happy to see that the person in charge of our group invited a VFP programmer to hang out with us yesterday to see what we are about. He is extremely knowledgable in C# also. One of the main thoughts of inviting him was to see about bringing in someone who could help with our Java training. And C# is close enough.
>
>PF
>>Hello Perry
>>
>>Apologies for huge post, but there is a point (eventually)
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>>My first "uh oh" re Foxpro came when Client/Server appeared and was going to answer all our prayers. At that stage, FP2.x was a poor player in the C/S arena- we had to purchase an extra connectivity kit to connect via ODBC; even multi-user was an extra purchase for the single-user base version. Products like Powerbuilder were going to destroy FP's powerbase overnight, apparently. I had managers of customers warning me to change tack, or they'd reconsider their selection of my services.
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>>I resisted that time and after a few years of live experimentation on customers and developers, people recognised Powerbuilder's deficiencies. Meanwhile VFP appeared with lots of native C/S capability. Score 1 for the "Festina Lente" (make haste slowly) Brigade.
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>>At the same time I was looking seriously at Delphi. Long story, but the VFP beta had better remote data capability than Delphi IMHO and we stuck with VFP.
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>>Eventually came Java and the Browser, especially once MS jumped on the bandwagon. By this time we'd had Jon Sigler as VFP product manager and it seemed that VFP was destined for a death by faint praise and neglect. Some of us mounted campaigns to change attitudes inside MS, with some success I'd like to think (though the FUD-meisters will no doubt scoff at that) but with new development needed for the web, and with legions of Java developers pouring out of universities, I made the same decision you've now made and made the switch. I didn't beat drums and gongs as I did it; I just disappeared.
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>>Thus I became one of the live Guinea-pigs used to prove and improve Java. MS helped by releasing IE3.01 with a Java bug that caused many applets to crash. You can imagine who the customers blamed. We'd selected a development tool called "supercede" that was backed by Paul Allen of MS fame; it offered compilation from Java to windows exe runtimes that ran at blistering speed; thus we attempted to spread our risk, since supercede could use C+ as well.
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>>A year later, with Supercede bust and only a single product released by us- a Browser java app whose commercial GUI classes took forever to load into IE3 - we gave up and moved back to VFP ISAPI development so we could release stuff that worked. Javabeans and the rest of it followed, but we didn't have time for another guinea-pig exercise and VFP was allowing us to deliver and remain profitable.
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>>So: if you're still with VFP, I'd have to say I can understand that. We've already had one iteration of dotNET; we can expect more improvements as the live guinea-pig provers and improvers do their stuff. A little birdie says that somebody is working on a dotNET version of that innocent little "persistent cursor" that does not hog memory and is taken for granted in VFP. As always, many who scoff at it now will embrace it enthusiastically once it becomes available.
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>>We've also seen the same as when VFP came out- those of us who jumped straight into VFP often had to re-write once we understood the environment better and realised how we could reduce maintenance and readibility using the new ways, or when new commercial plug-ins appeared to automate so much we'd labored on. Those who waited for frameworks were smart. We early adopters also struggled with king-hit bugs, like the memory leak with repeated requeries that ground my app to a halt inexplicably and cost a fortune to investigate.
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>>In the case of dotNET, I dipped my fingers in the water early on. We had to rewrite mid-beta when certain crucial functions changed completely and again at least twice because things inexplicably didn't work as we'd like. Bug or our inexperience? Who knows.
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>>Java has been exhaustively tested for many years and there should be no excuse for these sorts of bugs. There are also stable development environments that work really well in a windowsy fashion, unlike the ancient command-line methods that incredibly appeared in these "modern" development tools. I don't know about the politics you describe re Sun etc, but IBM and Oracle are deeply committed to open source, we won't be seeing them drop Linux and Java.
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>>That's my take and my whole position. I am not telling people to do anything. I am simply explaining why not suddenly crying "dotNET for me! oooooooh, yeah!" or "Java, Java, rah rah rah!" does not mean I am blind, stupid, ignorant or anything other than one of a rather large group of wily old coyotes, many of whom have their own variant of the above story. I am not opposed to dotNET- heck, we deployed dotNET work long before most of those who label us luddites.
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>>What I have noticed is that those who embrace dotNET often seem to adopt a slightly smug, superior demeanor. More than once I've seen dotNETters here lecturing on obvious points, as if to a wayward child. You mentioned before about "attitude". One of the most annoying attitudes is the self-appointed "visionary prophet" who moans that all we fools who won't listen are gonna get it. In the Old Testament they threw such prophets into wells because they are so disruptive and such a waste of time. QED.
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>>Good luck,
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>>Regards
>>
>>JR