Dear JVP,

Innovation and a healthy talent base/growing market being notable differences.

OK, you must be saying that people move to dotNET because of innovation and a healthy talent base/growing market.

Which means that you are attributing to VFP:

1) less Innovation
2) A less healthy/unhealthy talent base
3) A smaller/shrinking market.

To look at the points in reverse order:

3) I think we all agree that VFP's overall market is down. Development is segregating into open source and traditional windows development camps. Any tool like VFP that is outside both camps will shrink.

I'm sure we all agree that for some, this is an overwhelming siren-call to change horses- that would be true of ad-hoc consulting firms or technology writers/leaders, for example.

But hopefully we all also agree that this does not "prove" that anybody who stays in VFP is a fool or blind or all the rest of it. There will be profitable niches in VFP and in FP2.6 and similar tools for years to come. Did you know, for example, that one of the most popular tools for Vascular surgeons is written in Access97 using DAO(!) and maintained by a surgeon who is making a fortune from it. Does he care that DAO is "obsolete" or that his app will not run in latest Access or any of that? Nope. Try telling him that he needs to rewrite in dotNET, or that he is a fool compared to you and yours.

2) I think it is dangerous to label VFP as having a less healthy or unhealthy talent base. A clique of self-appointed experts may be well pleased with their own cleverness and talent in the decisions they make, but that does not mean that everybody else has less talent. This is not a class society, so "talent" must be determined by "success" in the usual fashion. Difficult when the most successful people generally refuse to participate in boasting.

1) Less innovation? Depends whether innovation means "change" or something that completely alters business practice, which is how I interpret "innovation". To be fair, much of the dotNET "innovation" is for developers who get to achieve familiar outcomes in cool new ways. So far we have seen few examples where dotNET allowed new ways of conducting business that were simply impossible before. Unless you have some examples for me- outcomes from using dotNET that were never seen before?