>I'll probably get flamed for this, but this is in the spirit of John Petersen's post at the VBPJ forum...
>
>Everyone points to VFP's OOP as superior to VB's object based approach. But what about VFP's lack of a full component based approach to development, something I've only seen personally in Borland products?
>
>Look at VFP's "Main Window", Report Writer, and Menu Designer. These are left-overs from FPW 2.6! VFP 5.0 should have dropped these and other unnecessary hold-overs from the past to attract new blood to the product.
>
>One can spend a lot of time going through various properties which indicate that they are for backward compatibility. How about giving us a fully component based VFP without all the luggage to support procedural coding practices from the past? Why would anyone want to convert an existing FPW 2.6 or FPD app to VFP? The forms look better in the older Fox versions...
>
>Let me get my fire suit on...

IMHO, no matter how powerful your development tool is, say the best of them all, the success of an application system is more on "How you design it" coupled with developers "Know-how" on the tools to be used. And so, if you have a good design and in-depth know-how on the tool, then there’s no reason why an application will not be successful. Like for instance, we took over 2 VBs, 1 PROGRESS apps and replace it with VFP, in fact another VB/SQL Server if get lucky. Why? Because of the design and development tool know-how of the developers. Programmers should stop pretending to be "linguist" if they can not deliver. And I have some friends say ohh.. we’re using VB, some PB, or Delphi but where’s the finished product? Nothing. I knew one software company, the project should only last 6 months using PB, but until now no delivery… its been 2 years now, and the client is now preparing to sue the software company.

Comparing development tools is really a never ending story. For sure, one tool have advantage over the other.