Hello everybody First of all I really sorry by my bad and poor English. I made my best.
I am a software developer for 26 years working with several programming languages mostly building Line Of Business applications in Brazil. I worked with Clipper since Clipper exists. I used the first copy sold in Brazil by Softcorp (succeeded by Officer and after Nantucket Brasil and CA Brasil). I worked on a company (one of the major business software companies in the world) that was practically the only VO beta tester in Brazil. It's a shame a good idea turns trash :-) As 1996 on internet era I change my career and dropped Clipper in favor of other solutions. Now I am back to LOB applications with total freedom to choose my way. I decided modernize my old Clipper applications "porting" to Harbour. I was a big lover of Clipper, specially 5.2 and I had supported the way Nantucket did think Clipper evolution and some aspects of Visual Objects developed by CA. I liked to see Clipper near to syntax and some semantics of C. Yes, I am not a typical Clipper developer. I think dBase style is a bad thing although is a necessary evil to carry. I want fix some errors and bad style which I made on 80's and use improved features available on Harbour. I need rewrite my C functions, throw away some, rethink about UI (console to GUI) and databases (transition from DBF to MySQL and others RDBMS). I think harbor 2.0 is a wonderful piece of software. It's not perfect because the heavy legacy to honor. I like the design of a clean core with extensions. I want publicly prize Viktor and PC (I can´t write his name :-) ). I agree with most of their decisions and I strongly appreciate their work. Ok, now I can criticize some points without fear :-) I want to see Harbour moving forward, not in xHarbour style, but in smart Harbour style. In Brazil we have a popular expression: The hasty eating raw :-) I want to make it clear: I want help Harbour development. Now I can mainly give my opinions, try to influence some decisions, suggest enhancements, report bugs. I need to get experience with C99 and GCC. My C experience is about MS-C 5.0 (I give you a candy if you know why :-) ). I need to get time to help with code. I will try to contribute with some thing later. I can't help too much with documentation, IMHO the biggest Harbour need, because my bad English. I am improving Wikipedia's article now. I invite you to contribute too. It's an initial work. I will contribute more on Portuguese article. I am writing about Harbour on a variety of articles (xBase, programming languages comparison, etc). See my contribs logged as bigown. Please, feel free to add new information or edit and delete wrong or bad text. I am reviewing text bring from xHarbour. It's a good way to learn more about Harbour. Viktor, I think now the article is very bad, but not a shame anymore ;-) In the next days I will try reply some old messages with my opinions. I would like help with HBIDE but I have a very different programming style and my major problem as developer is difficulty of adaptation on other style. Totally my fault. Anyway I would like to see HBIDE evolution mainly in code editor and debugger. In fact I hope to get HBIDE compiled. Four days trying and nothing :-) But I can't get any application using Qt or MySQL compiled. Maybe my Harbour build is wrong. I still trying. Well, I have to learn a lot about Harbour, try it on Linux and I hope PC (druzus) can get some time to answer some doubts about PP. I have special interest about it because I am thinking to write a transformation software to change my legacy code. I love Clipper/Harbour PP and I abuse it, but I know what I am doing. Now I have a lot of work to do. Thanks to everyone efforts. Harbour community need to be more active to "sell" Harbour on the web. IMHO most xBase programmer is individualist too much, including. I hope change this. Feel free to write me in private when the list is not adequate place. []'s Antonio Maniero
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