What to do when VFP is not alive anymore? 1

[Eliott]

Somewhere I read that Microsoft will not issue a Visual FoxPro 10, that "powerful nine" will cross into the Sedna project, and support for VFP 9 will stop after the 2014 year. This news really saddened me, because I have so far passed all versions of FP, from the time of MS DOS, through the VFP version 3, 5, 6, and now 9th Actually, I started as a COBOL programmer, and later I worked with Clipper small and medium projects and when I first saw the FP 2.6 for DOS I could not resist. I tried it in the meantime: C, Pascal, Delphi, Gupta ... But nothing was so easy and at your fingertips without having to learn everything from scratch. I thought that big M$ in the new version of VFP will install at least native support for MS SQL Server Express instead of the weak DBC, which would definitely make VFP as "gunboat" for all small and medium-DB programmers under Win platform, but it seems nothing of it.
As I plan to engage myself in programming for future decades, I am interested in whether on the market are some similar to VFP RAD-tools that include a relatively easy way of use today popular relational databases? Someone mentioned PowerBuilder, Visual FlexData... but I have not had the pleasure to test them. Do either of you working on any one alternative when VFP is not alive anymore? What are your thoughts about it? Thank you for your honest ideas & proposals.

There is no good nor evil, just decisions and consequences.

 

[JRB-Bldr]

I mentioned .NET as one of Micro$oft's current 'mainstream' languages/development tools.

Am I sure that .NET would 'rock' in the future?
Absolutely NOT ! ! ![/BU]

Not too many years ago, it did not even exist.
And will exist in a few more years? Who can tell!

Again, if you can tell the future, please feel free to do so and share your insight.
Otherwise we can only guess from our current point in time.

I merely suggested that if you want a GUARANTEE that you will stay in a language that will work with the most recent Windows OS's you could always stay with whatever the current M$ 'mainstream' languages were at the time.

That will most likely mean changing languages periodically as M$ changes.

Good Luck,
JRB-Bldr

 

[mmerlinn]

Elliot:

In my view your worries are relative groundless. You say you came from a COBOL background. COBOL has been "history" for decades, yet there are still new programmers learning COBOL to maintain legacy COBOL installations. Same will happen to FoxPro. You won't live long enough to see the final demise of FoxPro.

That is not to say there won't be hiccups as computers "improve" over the years. With the installed base of FP, someone will solve those hiccups in relatively short order as they appear.

And you can always go back to COBOL. All of the original COBOL programmers are dead or retired and new programmers are in big demand to maintain the legacy systems.

mmerlinn

http://mmerlinn.com

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