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>>>I would venture to say that MS is fully aware of the overall professionalism of the VB programming community and this is why they are very slow to adopt as great of an OOP model as Fox has. They probably figure they would lose a great number of VB adherents and THAT is MS worst nightmare.
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>>I personally think that the number of amateur coders started to drop with the advent of the Foundation READ (ugh). In fact, I know a number of them that dropped FoxPro because they couldn't figure it out. Then again, they couldn't bring them selves to use the Screen, Menu or Report designers, either. :-)
>
>Now that I think about it more, you are completely correct...I had forgotten about the mass hysteria that the Foundation READ invoked.

I think that VFP is much easier to understand than FP2.x, partly because I never liked the foundation read, which wasn't well documented, partly because the object model seems more consistent and comprehensive than the old "snippets". Of course, I never knew as much about old FP as I now know about VFP.

If VFP has lost customers, I think M$ Access might be the main reason. Not only is it a much easier entry-level tool, but it is a part of M$ Office Professional, which was displacing WordPerfect and Lotus at about the same time that VFP came out. Also, it was at that time that Access95 came out, making Access more like a professional tool.