> - RDBMS. When the day comes that RDBMS's are passé, replaced with > something so good that relational doesn't make sense anymore, then I > would be inclined to agree the genre is dead.
VFP doesn't even compare with other RDBMS's in common use today. Yes, sometimes the speed is comparible, but the featureset lags far behind Oracle, MSSQL, and MySQL(free versions exist of MySQL and MSSQL; possibly Oracle, but I'm not as familiar). > - Royalty-free. Need I expound? What's not? I haven't seen developer tools that are royalty free for a long time. If you're talking the RDBMS, there are very good free alternatives(MySQL/MSDE/SQL Express/SQLite) available for everything that VFP can scale to and even beyond. > - integrated product development system. The 10% at the top of our This is very common and has been for years. Not at all unique to VFP or xBase. > - a core language so rich that, after a lot of years, I have yet to use > every feature. There are some frustrations and limitations, but nothing > that can't be fixed or improved with effort. If there were a clearly > superior language/RDBMS dev system on the market, I'd have heard about > it, and frankly, I would have yearned to use it, but I'm not seeing such > a thing. What I do see are all the things I have yet to do, and can do, > with VFP. VFP's language is riddled with the curse of 'legacy'. This is just one thing that drags the language down. There are also many, many frustrations and limitations that can not easily be worked around in VFP. One in particular, is the flashing of images with alpha transparency information(png) when lockscreen is set to false. Having not control of the lower level GDI/GDIplus functions used to draw the screen, this is an un-solvable problem. > advantages of computers. There are literally billions of people out > there, mostly relatively poor, with a growing appetite for machines that > we take for granted. As the market extends, the favorites are going to > be products that deliver the best value, and nothing on the market says > "value" better then VFP (the genre). In many of these countries, all the products are 'free'... Hence, they end up with what's popular. Most certainly not VFP(though there are clear exceptions, of course). > And that's just where the genre stands today. Imagine it being even > better? It's dying. xbase is a file-based RDBMS. The years of file-based RDBMS's ruling supreme are far behind us. We're in the time of server-based RDBMS's. -- Derek _______________________________________________ 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.
