Hi, everyone. I was called about one week ago and asked if I want to give an interview for marketwatch.ro. They have a series of articles regarding major SGBDs and FoxPro came in line.
I am writing here the translation of the article. The article does not respect exactly what I said in interview, but mostly it does. Also, the translation is not perfect (sorry about that). Please let me know what you think – your opinion is important. Title: FoxPro’s days are numbered Subtitle: The FoxPro programming language was invented in the middle of the 80’s. Created for the computers that were using MS-DOS operating systems, at that time it was the programming language that was offering the fastest data access. In 1992 the product was bought by Microsoft. Microsoft offers support for Visual FoxPro till 2015. When Windows 95 was launched in ’95, Microsoft launched a new FoxPro version, adapted for Windows 95. FoxPro became an OOP language; in other words, it moved from structured programming to object oriented programming. Any application written in FoxPro works unmodified in Visual FoxPro, but the internal engine was rewritten from scratch to offer OOP features, such as inheritance and polymorphism. The second revolution in VFP’s life was VFP8, which allowed the connection to virtually any datasource, through cursoradapters. VFP 9 brought a new important change: the reporting system was modified allowing it to be extended by addons written by programmers. “The day of March 14, 2007 is written in black in my calendar. Microsoft posted the official announcement that there will no Visual FoxPro 10 version and the product is out of production. The support is extended to 2015.” says Grigore Dolghin, Visual FoxPro MVP. Subtitle: The FoxPro community badly needs help In Romania there is a VFP programmers community, which has about 5000 programmers. The Foxpro community was founded as a mail list back in 2000, then the community members have decided to create a community website, in 2005 (www.profox.ro), where the programmers can receive any help they need. There are several thousands of VFP applications out there, which need to be migrated somehow, in just few years. Some of these applications are used in big companies and even banks. “Unfortunatelly, Microsoft did very little, if anything at all, to help in this matter. The only solution I see to help these guys move forward is the community effort. Visual FoxPro works very well on Windows 7, I have tested it and used in real life applications. However, I don’t know how well it will perform on next Windows version, or on the version after that. Sooner or later some compatibily problems will show up, there’s no doubt about it. We have many VFP programmers, also we have lots of VFP applications. These guys have a pretty short time span, maybe 3-4 years, to migrate the applications to something else. The closest equivalent Microsoft product to VFP is Microsoft Access (file sharing database). I was pretty easy to foresee that sooner or later VFP will be killed. Back in 2005-2006 there was a petition in VFP world, asking if VFP should stay in Visual Studion package or to be marketed and sold as a separate product. For reason I can not comprehend, most of the answerers said it should be marketed as separate product. It was obvious this will close VFP to its end even more, because it’s obvious that VFP is not on MS priority list.” said Grigore Dolghin. In his last years, VFP’s development team had just three people. In the middle of 90’s, the VFP development team had about 100 people, 15 being implied in product testing only. FoxPro has another characteristic which makes it incompatible with the rest of the .NET programming environment. “The .NET is a pack of three programming languages: C#, VB.NET and F#. There are three major programming paradigms: structured programming (such as Pascal, FoxPro, etc), OOP (most of modern programming languages – VB.NET, C#, Java, Delphi, and so on), and functional programming. F# is Microsoft try to reach this market. It’s too early to say if it’s viable or not, I cannot have an opinion on it yet. All these OOP languages are strong typed. In other words, you have to declare variables, specify their datatype then use them only with the declared data type. Visual FoxPro doesn’t work that way, and this makes it incompatible with .NET languages. Since it was removed from Visual Studio packaged (that happened in around 2000), it was obvious that VFP will be marginalized and eventually stopped.” said Grigore Dolghin. Subtitle: Romanian State, the most important FoxPro user The most important FoxPro user is the Romanian state, and FoxPro still sells well in Romania. Abroad, though, the sales have dropped very much. Besides Romania, FoxPro is used in Czech Republich, in Russia and such. However, the financial revenue brought from these countries is not enough to sustain the product. “If you connect it to an SQL server and use VFP only as a language (I mean do not use the DBF’s, which are the main VFP’s weak point) then a VFP solution is pretty much viable. The Sanitary Direction of Bucharest has a database containing all companies in Bucharest and adjacent area (which means about half of the companies registered in Romania). That database it’s an MS SQL Server and the application is written in Visual FoxPro, by me, in 2003-2004, and still works flawlessly. In this way you can use the best from both worlds” explains Grigore Dolghin. Subtitle: Is good or bad for Visual FoxPro to exists? FoxPro has two big problems and these were the poisoned apple which killed him from a marketing point of view: first one is the lack of data security, and the second was the language is extremely easy to learn. For the second, the proof is that Visual FoxPro is still taught in Romanian schools. On one hand, it’s good to keep VFP alive, because it can be the first contact of youngsters with the programming world. On the other hand, is not good: “Because it is easy to learn, you can write a VFP program without reading a book. I am sorry to say that, but 60%-70% of the VFP programmers I know haven’t read even a single book about databases and programming. I really believe that Visual FoxPro should not exist anymore, because being so easy to learn, it allowed too many virtually illiterate programmers to write, build and sell programs. And most of those programs do not perform well. Who’s to blame? VFP!!! Not quite. The illiterate programmers are to blame. Unfortunatelly, the difference is subtle and VFP is a victim here.” said Grigore Dolghin. Subtitle: Solutions for Visual FoxPro The only two ways the VFP programmers can be helped are, accordingly to Grigore Dolghin, the migration to Linux or, if they choose to stay on Windows, a man dedicated to this migration, which can drag the entire community after him. “If 5000 possible customers are leaving you – that’s not easy to cope, even if you’re Microsoft. They are 5000 of possible licence buyers. From inside of FoxPro community, which is pretty big, someone should raise up and move the entire community. Such a guy is not hard to find, but this is a full time job. The only ones that could finance such activity are the guys at Microsoft, but nothing happens.” said Grigore Dolghin. The solution chosen by Grigore Dolghin personally was to move towards .NET: “If the programmer is 50 years old, it’s not worth migrating. He can use VFP till retirement, he has a customer base, an application base, and he can keep going this way for next 10 years and then he’ll enjoy the retirement. The ones on my age or younger – well, they have to do something about it. Either keep using a Microsoft product, either by moving to Linux. Unfortunately, none of the big Linux vendors have a VFP-equivalent product. I have chosen to move to .NET. Everyone has to have his own decision here.” adds Grigore Dolghin. =========================================================== Sorry if you find it long and hard to read. Thank you if you take the time to read it and tell me what you think. Thanks everyone. --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html --- _______________________________________________ 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 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.
