Lately I'm getting annoyed by the attitude of some well established VFP developers up here, esspecially with the enourmous increase of BUG reports of the hand of Fabio Lunardon.

I've taken the time to read through numerous messages and I get really annoyed by the resonse of some people up here. Fabio has proven in a very short time to be a advanced developer as he discovers a lot of BUGs in VFP that were not discovered by anyone else here on the forum. His broken english is not any burden to me, but seems to be a reason, as I see it, to bellitle and question him.

In a recent discussion about the open dialog showing up when a file could not be found or some some other reason an error occurred, I found some comment that really made me sick. Essentially Fabio was accused off:

1. Not coding properly
2. Not Understanding the difference between a BUG and a feature.
3. Raising irritation by people because reporting a bug which might not be a bug by some people.


All with all Fabio must have a thick skin in not taking the insults (Because some of they could only be explained as plain insults) personally.

In the case of the open file dialog.
- Anyone with an open mind could see that Fabio has a point. In about every case where you do something stupid in VFP, VFP will raise an trapable error as it should. Why not in the case where a file could not be found in the SQL SELECT statment? The counter arguments are laughable and very unthoughtfull:

1. "The applications structure should be examined" or "You should test at forehand is the alias is open".

First of all the alias does not have to be open. It could reference a file or an Alias. So you've got to check both.

Second, please check your own code, because I bet you don't do such checks either if you're about sure that file is there or that alias is open.

Third, You can stuff your whole project with checks and still find conditions where it is erroring (e.g. open de the CD romdrive when running the app from a CDRom)

Fourth. The current behaviour is old and well known, for us experienced VFP developers. How about the less experience developer and the newbee ? The current behaviour does not make much sence. O.K, we have to create a switch because of backward compatibility, but if I was to design this from the start, the dialog would not have been there.

2. When Fabio talks about a DESIGN BUG. The whole VFP elite jumps on him, appearantly not knowing what a DESIGN BUG means.

A design bug means that you appearently made a mistake in your design. In this case it would mean that the DESIGN BUG is that there is no way of suppressing this dialog. Please take a programming book and read about the difference between a DESIGN BUG and a PROGRAMMING BUG.


3. The reference to a book called "code complete" really is an insult to Fabio implying that Fabio has no idea of how to program an application. I find it just very irritation that this comment was made by one that does not show to have any particular skill in this field.

I should note that only a very small percentage of VFP developers will have read this book. And though it is a good book, IT IS NOT A REQUIREMENT FOR BEEING A GOOD VFP DEVELOPER and it certainly will not imply that YOU WILL BE A GOOD VFP DEVELOPER IF YOU READ THIS BOOK.

The attitude here seems to be: I don't have this problem in all my 25 years of programming experience, so there is no reason why Fabio should have this problem. A very narrow minded thought that does not regard of any intellect. Fabio might do very advanced things, you did not ever think of, so please be a bit more open minded.

4. The remark I really get irritated if something was reported as BUG while it is not made by some member up here recently is also irritating me.

Personally I try to look at a potentially form every angle before I post this to make sure that it is a BUG. However in my 20 or so posted bugs up here, there was one that was my own mistake dispite my effort to investigate. Everyone could have a bad day.

More irritating is someone defending the VFP behavior as a feature rather than a BUG while it really is clear that it is a bug if you read the example carefully. It had to take numerous messages to take this person by the hand and show what is going wrong. After beeing convinced that it was a bug he still was not convinced about the cause. The irritating part is the in my eyes arrogant attitude this person took in these messages. It would have suited so much better to ask Fabio what was happening in case he did not understand, in stead debunking Fabios assesment form the start and SWAGgin and Guessing what it might be and ignoring the rational examples.


Personally I've got some serious doubts on the quality of some of these so called experts here. They certainly have some skills in some area's, but these kind of messages really make me wonder if they have not grown an attitude because of their status up here. Of course I'm not talking about every elite member up here. There are certainly people up here who knowledge is not of any doubt, but still are willing to listen to fact and reason. One that comes in mind is Christof Lang.

As some member stated before. "Wait, let me get my firesuit on..."

Walter,