4 ms·

Once a guy told me that MS-DOS would be alive in 2000, I laughed at him. It was 1994 or so. Worked in DOS-based systems (running on Windows machines, at least)

by epx 6y ago

Once a guy told me that MS-DOS would be alive in 2000, I laughed at him. It was 1994 or so. Worked in DOS-based systems (running on Windows machines, at least) until 2005, had to find a job cross-country, and tell "no" firmly a number of times, to finally get rid of them and force the clients to move on. Clipper/xBase systems that do their job is one niche of MS-DOS apps that refuse to die. Another niche I know of, is gambling machines (one-armed bandits), for some reason people kept using DOS (at least they moved to FreeDOS by early 2000s).

pjmlp 6y ago
As someone that wrote Clipper applications during the early 90's, there are few systems that can match its elegance for CRUD driven applications. Doing DB operations is relatively simple, formdata entry and validation is super easy, supports modules, OOP and even compiles to native code. Yeah not good for networked operations, but in many mom and pop shops it isn't needed anyway. Even VB/Delphi for all their RAD capabilities were already much more complex than Clipper, but they messed up their migration into the GUI world and CA Visual Objects was too complex for the Clipper crowd.
- neverartful 6y ago
  Spot on with Clipper. I used it to write software for a mom and pop shop and it worked fantastic until I started running out of memory. We transitioned from DOS/Clipper to OS/2 with VX-REXX at that point. VX-REXX was also equally impressive.
watermelon59 6y ago
Do you think Clipper/xBase is a niche one could get into at this point in history? Or is that market already fully taken by old timers?
- neverartful 6y ago
  There are 2 aspects you would need to consider - the toolset and the product market. I don't think Clipper is sold anymore although there are some alternatives (Harbour). I think the products that still use Clipper would likely either be POS or a niche utility use. I don't know the feasibility of new entries in those markets.
- exikyut 6y ago
  In all honesty my two responses would be COBOL and simplicity-focused PHP/HTML5/{SQLite/MySQL}. COBOL/FORTRAN/Prolog/etc type applications are out there, apparently, and if you're in the right place at the right time you can entrench reasonably effectively, at least short term. However, these types of jobs also have their own unique pain points. This recent article (they surface reasonably frequently on here), and the comments, make for good reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148840 As for PHP+et al, I recommend these for their overall simplicity, relatively low learning curve, and ability to scale "well enough", for above-average values of "well enough". PHP itself isn't the most ideally designed language, but it can actually get things done. Furthermore, its reputation as a "simple" or "stupid" language, like eg VB6, can also serve to catalyze the upper bound of expected complexity of a particular solution. This has the downside of maybe a bit of isolation from truly interesting challenges, but allows for a slower/relaxed and perhaps more maintainable pace. (And there's nothing stopping you building something Facebook-sized if you needed to.) On the client side, HTML5 is expansive and... very backward compatible with how things have been done for the past 20 years. Elitist forum commentators may make snooty noises about your use of tables, but Chrome won't. JavaScript could be a harder language to reason about, especially for simple enhancements like fetching bits of data which won't require learning pages of theory first. Finally, my recommendation to focus on the Web is that, well, once you grumble and context-switch to "ugh, fine, HTML+JS", everything else can roll in incrementally as you go along. With something stuck in the 80s/90s, sure, you guarantee that you're completely isolated from the firehose... at the cost of being objectively less economically viable in industry.
- epx 6y ago
  Not sure how much xBase code still runs out there to be maintained or rewritten. Depends on your market. At least here, the businesses that still ran xBase were the ones unwilling or unable to pay decently for maintenance and/or migration, and that was the situation 10+ years ago. Haven't looked into Harbour featureset, but I feel xBase in general is simply too simple for new developments. Even mom-and-pop stores need features way beyond the Clipper/MS-DOS capabilities. The language is outdated, too; even Delphi/Lazarus sounds too 1990ish to me, I have fond memories of Delphi and Object Pascal but it is impossible to justify using them in a world with so many good new languages.
SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
DOS is the cheapest RTOS and simplest RTOS, with very hard guarantees (just disable interrupts altogether, and run a busy loop).

by epx 6y ago

pjmlp 6y ago

As someone that wrote Clipper applications during the early 90's, there are few systems that can match its elegance for CRUD driven applications. Doing DB operations is relatively simple, formdata entry and validation is super easy, supports modules, OOP and even compiles to native code. Yeah not good for networked operations, but in many mom and pop shops it isn't needed anyway. Even VB/Delphi for all their RAD capabilities were already much more complex than Clipper, but they messed up their migration into the GUI world and CA Visual Objects was too complex for the Clipper crowd.

neverartful 6y ago
Spot on with Clipper. I used it to write software for a mom and pop shop and it worked fantastic until I started running out of memory. We transitioned from DOS/Clipper to OS/2 with VX-REXX at that point. VX-REXX was also equally impressive.

watermelon59 6y ago

Do you think Clipper/xBase is a niche one could get into at this point in history? Or is that market already fully taken by old timers?

neverartful 6y ago
There are 2 aspects you would need to consider - the toolset and the product market. I don't think Clipper is sold anymore although there are some alternatives (Harbour). I think the products that still use Clipper would likely either be POS or a niche utility use. I don't know the feasibility of new entries in those markets.
exikyut 6y ago
In all honesty my two responses would be COBOL and simplicity-focused PHP/HTML5/{SQLite/MySQL}. COBOL/FORTRAN/Prolog/etc type applications are out there, apparently, and if you're in the right place at the right time you can entrench reasonably effectively, at least short term. However, these types of jobs also have their own unique pain points. This recent article (they surface reasonably frequently on here), and the comments, make for good reading: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25148840 As for PHP+et al, I recommend these for their overall simplicity, relatively low learning curve, and ability to scale "well enough", for above-average values of "well enough". PHP itself isn't the most ideally designed language, but it can actually get things done. Furthermore, its reputation as a "simple" or "stupid" language, like eg VB6, can also serve to catalyze the upper bound of expected complexity of a particular solution. This has the downside of maybe a bit of isolation from truly interesting challenges, but allows for a slower/relaxed and perhaps more maintainable pace. (And there's nothing stopping you building something Facebook-sized if you needed to.) On the client side, HTML5 is expansive and... very backward compatible with how things have been done for the past 20 years. Elitist forum commentators may make snooty noises about your use of tables, but Chrome won't. JavaScript could be a harder language to reason about, especially for simple enhancements like fetching bits of data which won't require learning pages of theory first. Finally, my recommendation to focus on the Web is that, well, once you grumble and context-switch to "ugh, fine, HTML+JS", everything else can roll in incrementally as you go along. With something stuck in the 80s/90s, sure, you guarantee that you're completely isolated from the firehose... at the cost of being objectively less economically viable in industry.
epx 6y ago
Not sure how much xBase code still runs out there to be maintained or rewritten. Depends on your market. At least here, the businesses that still ran xBase were the ones unwilling or unable to pay decently for maintenance and/or migration, and that was the situation 10+ years ago. Haven't looked into Harbour featureset, but I feel xBase in general is simply too simple for new developments. Even mom-and-pop stores need features way beyond the Clipper/MS-DOS capabilities. The language is outdated, too; even Delphi/Lazarus sounds too 1990ish to me, I have fond memories of Delphi and Object Pascal but it is impossible to justify using them in a world with so many good new languages.

SomeoneFromCA 6y ago

DOS is the cheapest RTOS and simplest RTOS, with very hard guarantees (just disable interrupts altogether, and run a busy loop).