David,

Hmm, perhaps I didn't make myself completely clear here. By new to VFP I mean new to VFP and OOP at the same time. In this instance, I would suggest, that the developer isn't really sufficiently experienced to be developing commercial applications in VFP using OOP techniques.

Now obviously, this is a general statement and there are cases when it is fine to do otherwise. For example, the case where a team of experienced developers are working with developers new to VFP & OOP. Here the experience of other developers is being used to train & check the new developer's code.

Personally, I don't think that the VFP pool of developers is dwindling but I would prefer to see it dwindle because not enough people are programming in it rather than having it dwindle because too many clients are hearing bad things about it because of inexperienced developers not doing as good a job as one might expect, purely because they are inexperienced.

Now, before you, or anyone else reading this, decided that I'm slagging off VFP developers, let me say quite categorically, that I feel that the quality of VFP programming in general is extremely high, but inexperienced developers make more mistakes than experienced ones (in general).

Does this clarify what I was trying to say?

Regards,

Mark Austen
[Schooner Software Limited]