5 ms·

Ah foxpro. That was a great interview around dbase (EDIT: foxpro does not build on top of dbase I was wrong). I played around a lot with dbase in my early days

by keyle 4y ago

Ah foxpro. That was a great interview around dbase (EDIT: foxpro does not build on top of dbase I was wrong). I played around a lot with dbase in my early days. It was very cool. I never felt out of my league. I've seen some of the ugliest yet most functional software done in foxpro. Incredibly easy to build feature rich software that unfortunately looked like dog poop. Which has let them to either profit enough for a modern rewrite in .net, or disappear. Most of the shops that moved to .net highly missed how productive they were with tiny teams in foxpro, and how expensive the move to .net had been. If only foxpro had remained a viable option similar to VB, history might have gone a different way. You have to respect how productive people were in those time. We really took a dive. Budgets blew up, so did team sizes, and here we are. Stacks like foxpro and dbase allowed people like my uncle in his basement to start a massive business, or maintain the list of shirts he sent to the dry cleaners.

tpmx 4y ago
> I've seen some of the ugliest yet most functional software done in this. Incredibly easy to build feature rich software that unfortunately looked like dog poop. Can you find any screenshots to illustrate this? I'm curious about how you make the IBM PC 80x25 text screen look like poop. :)
- keyle 4y ago
  When your product looked like this, it was really hard to compete against new products coming to windows with winform https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/2x-841fe628c2d754d58f53be733811c3c1-Foxpro%202.0%20-%20Screen.png https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/2x-841fe628c2d754... vs. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/advanced/media/walkthrough-creating-an-accessible-windows-based-application/visual-basic-pizza-order-form.gif?view=netframeworkdesktop-4.8 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/adv...
  - kjellsbells 4y ago
    I dont disagree with you for the era that such comparisons were made, say 1995. But in retrospect I wonder if the kind of people who used these very specific line of business apps were more productive in the gui or the text mode where theyd probably memorized the key sequences by the end of their third day.
  - hulitu 4y ago
    The speed of your windows program was much lower. More so if you needed to use the mouse.
blihp 4y ago
FoxPro was a competitor of dBase, not built on top of it. It was at least mostly source code compatible with dBase III programs though, IIRC. For its day, it actually could produce some of the better looking DOS-based database apps if you actually wrote them as native FoxPro applications and didn't just migrate some old FoxBase or dBase code to it. Microsoft (who purchased the company and its products) deliberately hobbled, and then killed, FoxPro as a product since it didn't fit into their product strategy. I recall reading an interview where it was stated that MSFT believed FoxPro provided too much value vs the licenses (mainly Access or SQL Server) they were trying to sell instead which was part of why they wanted it to disappear.
leviathant 4y ago
>Stacks like foxpro and dbase allowed people like my uncle in his basement to start a massive business, or maintain the list of shirts he sent to the dry cleaners. Ha. After my webmaster internship at the local newspaper ended, I took a gig doing data entry for a guy operating out of his basement on Visual FoxPro apps for things like HVAC equipment selection and other calculation software for area manufacturers. He'd talk about the dozens of developers and millions of dollars that it took to build the in-house solution, and how everyone preferred his application. He must have had a champion in the company, because his software was freely downloadable. He was fond of saying "FoxPro is very robust," and absolutely resisted learning anything else. For various reasons, I ended up going elsewhere... It was 2003, FoxPro was deader than dead. To me it was, anyway. I just visited his website, which somehow is still around (and still designed for 800x600 monitors), and he's still using and promoting Visual FoxPro as of 2020. Hey, go with what works for you, I guess.
eastbound 4y ago
> I've seen some of the ugliest yet most functional software done in foxpro. The question was, what, after dBase/FoxPro? In 2000s, there wasn’t a single proper stack. I did an internship in 2003 to migrate a company owner’s awesome dBase system into this awful architecture. - VB6 was rejected because it didn’t integrate a DB, - .Net was way-too-hard for the quidams they were. > Budgets blew up, so did team sizes Nowadays people can’t have a custom DB. We tell them to use Facebook’s CRM, because they wouldn’t be able to hire a 120k$ engineer, who are billed at this rate because they are n-times more productive than a grandpa with WinFox. Are we really that productive?
- fomine3 4y ago
  You mean after MS Access? Agree that current situation is bad.

by keyle 4y ago

tpmx 4y ago

> I've seen some of the ugliest yet most functional software done in this. Incredibly easy to build feature rich software that unfortunately looked like dog poop. Can you find any screenshots to illustrate this? I'm curious about how you make the IBM PC 80x25 text screen look like poop. :)

keyle 4y ago
When your product looked like this, it was really hard to compete against new products coming to windows with winform https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/2x-841fe628c2d754d58f53be733811c3c1-Foxpro%202.0%20-%20Screen.png https://winworldpc.com/res/img/screenshots/2x-841fe628c2d754... vs. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/advanced/media/walkthrough-creating-an-accessible-windows-based-application/visual-basic-pizza-order-form.gif?view=netframeworkdesktop-4.8 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/winforms/adv...
- kjellsbells 4y ago
  I dont disagree with you for the era that such comparisons were made, say 1995. But in retrospect I wonder if the kind of people who used these very specific line of business apps were more productive in the gui or the text mode where theyd probably memorized the key sequences by the end of their third day.
- hulitu 4y ago
  The speed of your windows program was much lower. More so if you needed to use the mouse.

blihp 4y ago

FoxPro was a competitor of dBase, not built on top of it. It was at least mostly source code compatible with dBase III programs though, IIRC. For its day, it actually could produce some of the better looking DOS-based database apps if you actually wrote them as native FoxPro applications and didn't just migrate some old FoxBase or dBase code to it. Microsoft (who purchased the company and its products) deliberately hobbled, and then killed, FoxPro as a product since it didn't fit into their product strategy. I recall reading an interview where it was stated that MSFT believed FoxPro provided too much value vs the licenses (mainly Access or SQL Server) they were trying to sell instead which was part of why they wanted it to disappear.

leviathant 4y ago

>Stacks like foxpro and dbase allowed people like my uncle in his basement to start a massive business, or maintain the list of shirts he sent to the dry cleaners. Ha. After my webmaster internship at the local newspaper ended, I took a gig doing data entry for a guy operating out of his basement on Visual FoxPro apps for things like HVAC equipment selection and other calculation software for area manufacturers. He'd talk about the dozens of developers and millions of dollars that it took to build the in-house solution, and how everyone preferred his application. He must have had a champion in the company, because his software was freely downloadable. He was fond of saying "FoxPro is very robust," and absolutely resisted learning anything else. For various reasons, I ended up going elsewhere... It was 2003, FoxPro was deader than dead. To me it was, anyway. I just visited his website, which somehow is still around (and still designed for 800x600 monitors), and he's still using and promoting Visual FoxPro as of 2020. Hey, go with what works for you, I guess.

eastbound 4y ago

> I've seen some of the ugliest yet most functional software done in foxpro. The question was, what, after dBase/FoxPro? In 2000s, there wasn’t a single proper stack. I did an internship in 2003 to migrate a company owner’s awesome dBase system into this awful architecture. - VB6 was rejected because it didn’t integrate a DB, - .Net was way-too-hard for the quidams they were. > Budgets blew up, so did team sizes Nowadays people can’t have a custom DB. We tell them to use Facebook’s CRM, because they wouldn’t be able to hire a 120k$ engineer, who are billed at this rate because they are n-times more productive than a grandpa with WinFox. Are we really that productive?

fomine3 4y ago
You mean after MS Access? Agree that current situation is bad.