02:02:14 AM
3FE04D84I
Over the last few years there have been many discussions to the eventual end of MS Visual Foxpro. There have been several projects sprung up that have attempted to either extend the life of VFP or become an alternative replacement. The replacements have either totally failed or do not resemble VFP in any such way.
The logical evolution for desktop development in Windows appears to be with little question the .NET framework. My biggest bugbear with this is that although I love C# as a language the closest language to VFP is VB.NET and to be honest doesn't come close.
Giving this some long thought I questioned why I would miss VFP. I have totally accepted .NET and C# yet something was missing. From time to time I end up cutting some VFP code for legacy systems that have not migrated yet and then it struck me. Its nothing more than the VFP language itself that I will miss, not VFP. Looking at the roots of this, VFP was based on the DBase language, my initial searches for VFP language alternatives proved pretty fruitless. I specifically wanted to find the language reincarnated in .NET, no joy.
I was so disheartened as I was coming to the realisation we may actually be seeing a death of a language. People could argue the langauge is outdated, but the truth is it isn't really. It's just a language and it can evolve sensibly like any other. There are many other successful dynamic languages like VFP about.
I then thought harder. VFP fell out with Ashton-Tate back in the day over the DBase langauge. If you look at this single fact, the VFP language is truely a Dbase language at its heart. This made me look, and what do you know, there it is, DBase. DBase appears to still exist and under what seems to be something close to its original company. The website is: http://www.dbase.com.
It appears the language still lives on in a more modern way. It is a shame it is not based on .NET, not sure if this is a disadvantage though. My biggest concern is why I have not picked up on this in any forums anywhere when people were looking for VFP alternatives? Is this purely on the basis of the history between VFP and DBase? You would think those days were gone? I'm interested in whether people even realised DBase even still existed? Whether or not I look at this any closer, I'm just humbled by the fact that we have not seen a death of a language. For me that would be a total tradgedy.
What are peoples thoughts on this?
Regards
Richard