Kurt, My message has been aimed at those businesses who already have FoxPro. I assume your email relates to a new project. The real question is not how "old" FoxPro is but whether for this customer with his constraints, is it the best solution. If we gave all of the specifics to 100 seasoned programmers with a variety of backgrounds and skill sets, we would likely get about 50 different solutions with about 5 of the solutions clustering around the major languages. But based on my 31 years experience, almost all of the solutions would be from a technical point of view, not from a business persons point of view.
A business person's very first question is always "Can I afford this solution?” not "Is this the best language?". If he can afford it, the next question is "Do I want to put that much of my limited resources into this project?". In other words, the return on investment may not be as high as the return on investment in, for example, increasing his marketing and sales staff. Those 2 questions are then followed by many others that all need to be carefully considered. My plan is, with the help of all of our programmers' experiences, develop a comprehensive checklist that will be sent to all of my current and prospective customers. It will also be on my website. But I digress. Your email specifically talked about Visual FoxPro 9 being too old. What makes a computer language old? Does old mean applications are going to develop fatal diseases and die? Does it mean the other solutions are less expensive to write and support? Exactly what does it mean? I think for most technical people, it means that Microsoft will no longer support Visual FoxPro 9 as of January 2015. Does that mean all of our programs will stop working in February 2015? Question: how many decades ago did Microsoft stop supporting DOS? Question: how many DOS applications are still in use? Answer: lots. Why do so many DOS apps still work? Because only the lack of a platform and operating system will stop DOS from working. Only the lack of a 32 bit operating system will stop Visual FoxPro from working and that day, in my opinion and many others, is 10-20 years away but more likely 30 or more years away. By that time, there will certainly be solutions infinitely better than anything available today. Meantime, the business person can use the vast sums saved by using Visual FoxPro (yes, VFP is demonstrably less expensive to write and maintain) for better and more profitable purposes. Conclusion: for many businesses, investing in Visual FoxPro 9 is one of the smartest business decisions they will ever make. More later and thanks for your feedback. Please let me know what feed back you get. I want to broadcast it to the world. Wes Wes Wilson, President ERW Custom Programming, Inc. Crescent Lake Plaza 5459 Elizabeth Lake Rd. Waterford, MI 48327 (248) 683-4182 http://www.erw.com/ [email protected] www.visualfoxprohelpwanted.com/VFPHelpWantedShortForm.php --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html --- _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://mail.leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** 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.
