31–40 of 108 posts
FoxPro 2.x was absolutely amazing. Incredibly fast, easy to develop with once you understood how it worked. And portable - 2.5 had a version that ran on SCO Unix.
Knew a guy who published a technical book, bigger than a phone book, and he wrote it all in FoxPro and that was 2010.
I have a bit of experience with older verdions of DBase and Clipper and I find this extremely odd. Can you give us a bit more details? I am genuinely curious: maybe Foxpro had some fancy reporting capabilities that made it more feasible but the only type of "book" I could imagine writing with such a tool is some sort of catalog. I.e. each product has a page (maybe with part number, pictures and price, description, ma…
I've never written a book in a DBMS(!) but it seems plausible.
A great starting point for a young developer.
So much of the early computer world was getting data in databases and spreadsheets. Covers a significant percentage of usecases (and still does with stuff like SharePoint or even SAP).
And dBase and its variants/rivals had that pretty much covered, from CP/M to Ataris to DOS and later Windows. Also begat a wide spectrum of programming it, from simple end-user customization to pretty large multi-person applications.
But now? The whole xBase/Clipper-verse almost seems like a unique dead end, in an industry that keeps pretty much every other technology afloat. And it doesn't even seem that that is purely for technical reasons. Sure, client/server and more powerful machiens meant that "proper" RDBMS were getting common, and with environments like Visual Basic or Delphi you could create some pretty neat frontends.
But that was only part of it. Bad acquisitions were another one, with Borland buying dBase and Microsoft buying FoxBase. Not before the dBase makers were a bit too litigious, which doesn't really help trust in the market and individual products.
Right now, the most prominent products still somewhat in line with that would be Access and FileMaker, and they seem slightly different beasts. Or maybe even cloud-based data buckets like Firebase, but they don't quite seem as "egalitarian". And while NoSQL database might claim some relationship, their usage patterns are quite different.
Another one that would be a cool open source project.
The whole xBase universe is quite fascinating. It might not have been as revolutionary as spreadsheets, but having databases on your homecomputer/PC covers a lot of use cases for regular people and small businesses. Heck, a lot of what we make way too much money with is basically "just" polishing that. (Or trying to sell you pills while you use that, but let's not digress) And dBase and its variants/rivals had that p…
Amen. Add also Nantucket (Clipper) being acquired by CA (Computer Associates) which pretty much killed Clipper.
Here is my project https://github.com/imvetri/ui-editor