>HI Hilmar
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>>One, and this is the most serious disadvantage IMO, is that VFP works only on Windows. This is becoming more serious by the day, now that entire countries are switching to Linux. Note that .NET has the same disadvantage, so frankly, I see no reason to switch to .NET: Invest a lot of time learning a language which I may not be able to use 5 years from now?
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>I think this is a valid point which I alluded to in my post re the open source movement, the switch to Linux, Apache, PHP, etc by many companies and some governments.
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>>Two, since it isn't really compiled, it may simply not be fast enough for some low-level development. This may usually not be relevant for writing database applications for the business. And I never saw a need for more speed. However, this can be a consideration in some cases.
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>Well, I assume that VFP developers are using it for database type apps so this has never been an issue to me. If you want low level stuff then you would probably use C/C++. BTW - I dont think .Net languages are compiled in that sense either. They get compiled to MSIL, not machine code.