>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...

Let's see, where's my torch?... ;)

It takes little time reading through the academic literature while comparing VFP to VB to understand that VFP fulfills the definition of an object-oriented language, while VB does not - simply put, VB does not support inheritance. Thus, if one wishes to use the object-oriented paradigm, and if one is choosing between those two languages, VB fails to satify the requirements of the job, while VFP succeeds.

Having said that, VFP is what is termed a mixed language, with both object-oriented and procedural elements in it. C++ is also mixed, but is a more consistent language internally. And lately, I've been studying a Smalltalk interpreter in my spare time - the idea of everything being an object fascinates me.

There are several thing that influence VFP's development. It has a long legacy to maintain, backward compatibility being what it is in the market. However, it also has a very robust table system in its favor, though I would like to see an Object Data Base Management System implemented, either within VFP or as an ActiveX product.

As for why anyone would want to upgrade their app from FP 2.6 to VFP 5.0, I just spent a year and a half doing just that - from the ground up - and am very happy with the results.