Dear Rod,

>>Sometimes when you consider something to be unfair or wrong you need to speak up which is something that is lacking in this world.

OK, that's fine, and I've done enough of that in my time- I endured a piling-on some years back when I observed (correctly) that MVP status had become divorced from contribution and that there were complacent life-members coasting along contributing very little to the community to which they are apparently important.

The problem comes when "speaking up" goes on and on and on, dominating proceedings with slogans and truisms about which people must endure lectures as if to the stupidist sort of child.

Just by way of example, it really is tiresome when people boast that they warned in 1952 or whenever about MS's direction and the state of the VFP market.

Good grief! Even the dullest luddite has that one figured out by now. The fact that so many remain here cannot possibly be attributed to lumpen inertia, but to some other characteristic/s that the prophet must have missed.

Rather than having "heads in the sand", my impression is that VFP people (including those seeking greener fields) have far more awareness of various methodologies available in other environments than most other groups. One only has to look at the VB guru response to OOP (VB either had "object-based which is just as good" or didn't need it... until it became available in which case OOP became an elegant, important methodology) ... and I feel very certain that scalable local datasets will become a fabulous innovation once they are available in dotNET. Few outsiders will realize that FP users took this for granted since the late 1980s which makes it somewhat difficult to be impressed by such an "innovation".

I guess my point is that when prophets come in here boasting that they realized ages ago that the sky is blue and we dumbos better start listening... then it starts out tiresome and rapidly becomes insulting and irritating. The assumed superiority that motivates this lecturing has no basis- one does not gain 50 IQ points by deciding to like dotNET. People who keep behaving that way can expect a negative reaction... not because they are a spurned prophet but because busy people don't perceive value in 50 messages "informing" them that "the sky is blue, dummy".

Happy to leave it there.