On 10/10/06, Bill Arnold <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Premature disgruntaltion! :)
Perhaps not for your business, Bill. But for many. Gruntle's down nearly 60% here.
- the product works very well and is dependable.
True. We have dozens of users enjoying our vertical niche product, and hope they continue to for the next decade. Over the 15 years I was actively pursuing VFP work I have no doubt had a positive impact on tens of thousands of desktops.
- it's the only significant product with a built-in rdbms and those indispensable cursors
Dabo. Taken from another angle: if we're the only one with that feature, maybe everyone else has decided that the feature may not be as necessary now as it once was.
- it's going to be officially supported for another 8 years, as long as any other MS product
Assuming you want "support" from MS. Other languages out there are mostly likely going to be supported forever. And there is no one to set a "deadline" for support.
- if it checks out on Vista, an OS not even delivered yet, that will extend VFP's life for as long as Vista is around - on top of users still running Win/2k and up, which covers a major percentage of the world's computers.
And why would you want to run Vista? And what makes you think a security patch couldn't disable VFP's runtime?
- user's don't care what language a program was written in. I installed my product at a small business location a few weeks ago, and there was no mention of what language it was written in. For all they know or care about it could be written in Swahili.
For SMB businesses, that is often the case. For larger corporate clients, a different matter. Most anyone with an IT shop has deep concerns about what support they have to provide for an application. And VFP can be fairly high-maintenance.
- as more developing countries come on-line, they will be all too happy to discover something like FoxPro. A really good business bet would be foreign lang support.
Why would you choose a proprietary language supported by only one vendor, with a history of predatory practices, convictions for bad business behavior, high license costs (annual in some cases), currently under severe penalties in the EU, and clearly not an important product to that vendor? The One Laptop Per Child project won't run VFP.
- Solutions for almost anything can be added to the product using it's own language or c, so it's growth is still happening.
As can be said for nearly every other language out there. Perl, Python, Ruby, Lua, C,...
- If it's frozen, then MS wouldn't redesign it!
Ha! That's true, you've found an upside!
- we really have no idea what possibilities we'll be able to choose from a decade from now.
Look back a decade and look at the "choice" we had then: 95 and NT. The best predictor of the future is the past, unless we do something to change it. "We must be the future we want." This is fun. Haven't had a "Fox is Dead" thread since... last month. I wasn't saying that the language was dead, just that trying to juice an artificial count of languages is silly. It's a popularity contest. And I've done my part: white papers, fox wiki posts, blogs, etc. But, like fashion, the world has moved on, and we're best off moving with them. Or to the beat of our own drummer. And, no, you're not pissing me off. The dead-horse-flogging was a flippant, off-the-cuff comment, but there's backup for it, too. "We have met the enemy and it is us. We are faced with insurmountable opportunity." The world is a great big place and there are huge opportunities for skilled consultants and developers like us to succeed in environments where we don't have to fight so hard to use the right tools for the job. -- Ted Roche Ted Roche & Associates, LLC http://www.tedroche.com _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
