3 ms·

I started out with dBase II moved to 3 and graduated to Clipper. I adored Clipper and built my first company with it. Then with the introduction of Windows 3

by rmason 4y ago

I started out with dBase II moved to 3 and graduated to Clipper. I adored Clipper and built my first company with it. Then with the introduction of Windows 3 the world changed and suddenly any DOS UI was ancient. I moved to Delphi and then the world changed again. The web caught my eye and I moved on again to ColdFusion. Here in Michigan there are small niches where people are still selling Clipper programs and making a living from it, mostly one or two person teams.

fcoury 4y ago
That is amazing to hear, I would love to get back to those years through some existing software. The thing I most remember about Clipper 5 is that it had CodeBlocks that resemble today’s closures in most languages. Do you remember that? :) My pathway right after was Delphi as well. After it “ended” I contributed a tiny bit to the Harbour project but I think it came a little too late.
- jasim 4y ago
  Yes, IIRC, Clipper 5's big marketing point was `aeval`! (short for array eval, array.map in modern langs). Clipper also had a huge array of third party libraries, I fondly remember Nanfor, Grumpfish, and SuperLib. If you want to see some code, here's a repo of one of my Clipper projects: https://github.com/jasim/EasyAccounts https://github.com/jasim/EasyAccounts There is also The Oasis mirrors which have a large cache of Clipper code: https://harbour.github.io/the-oasis/docs/ https://harbour.github.io/the-oasis/docs/
  - fcoury 4y ago
    Whoa I will definitely check it out tomorrow. Thanks for sharing!
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Classes and functional programming in MS-DOS. Sometimes I dive into old programming stuff I used to do, mostly forgotten and then get amazed how I was doing OOP, functional programming, memory safe systems programming, some form of automatic memory management, AOT compiled languages (statically linked) and now it seems everyone is kind of rediscovering what we were doing almost 40 years ago.

by rmason 4y ago

fcoury 4y ago

That is amazing to hear, I would love to get back to those years through some existing software. The thing I most remember about Clipper 5 is that it had CodeBlocks that resemble today’s closures in most languages. Do you remember that? :) My pathway right after was Delphi as well. After it “ended” I contributed a tiny bit to the Harbour project but I think it came a little too late.

jasim 4y ago
Yes, IIRC, Clipper 5's big marketing point was `aeval`! (short for array eval, array.map in modern langs). Clipper also had a huge array of third party libraries, I fondly remember Nanfor, Grumpfish, and SuperLib. If you want to see some code, here's a repo of one of my Clipper projects: https://github.com/jasim/EasyAccounts https://github.com/jasim/EasyAccounts There is also The Oasis mirrors which have a large cache of Clipper code: https://harbour.github.io/the-oasis/docs/ https://harbour.github.io/the-oasis/docs/
- fcoury 4y ago
  Whoa I will definitely check it out tomorrow. Thanks for sharing!
pjmlp 4y ago
Classes and functional programming in MS-DOS. Sometimes I dive into old programming stuff I used to do, mostly forgotten and then get amazed how I was doing OOP, functional programming, memory safe systems programming, some form of automatic memory management, AOT compiled languages (statically linked) and now it seems everyone is kind of rediscovering what we were doing almost 40 years ago.