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Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

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Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#81

Post by ampdepolymerase »

signal11 wrote: post #47
mhd wrote: post #34

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…

> The whole xBase/Clipper-verse almost seems like a unique dead end, in an industry that keeps pretty much every other technology afloat. Interestingly Claris's FileMaker is still in business: https://www.claris.com/filemaker/pro/ And of course many editions of MS Office include Microsoft Access, which undoubtedly had a role to play in killing dBase, Borland’s Paradox, and Lotus’s Approach. Access’s not quite as perv…

Note that Claris/FileMaker is a subsidiary of Apple.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#82

Post by badsectoracula »

CivBase wrote: post #64
phendrenad2 wrote: post #60

Software definitely lost something when we gained the ability to ship it as separate components over the internet. If you "just" configure components A, B, C, and D, you too can have the equivalent of what FoxPro had in 1993! It may not be The Unix Way(TM), but having an all-in-one solution is very appealing even today.

Is there anything in the The Unix Way(TM) that prevents a the success of project which bundles up components and makes them accessible under a single interface? EDIT: Adding this bit. Seems to me that compartmentalizing functionality isn't the problem. The problem is just that good interface design is hard. Arguments about interfaces have fragmented many communities in the Linux world, resulting in a lot of relativel…

Yes, because it isn't just the UI (from your comment about Linux i guess you mean UI with "interface") but about how everything is designed with the rest in mind with no seams in-between.

The "unix way" is to have reusable independent pieces that focus only on one thing that you connect together to create your application (often while accepting any limitations due to those connections - e.g. communication being in text format only). This is in complete antithesis to the monolithic all-in-one design that tools like dBase, FoxPro, classic Visual Basic (to some extent), etc provided.

It is important to keep in mind that these tools aren't just the sum of their parts, you can't take each part in isolation - it is the entire thing as a whole.

Now, you can grab these individual components and throw a blanket over them that pretends to be one unified whole, but AFAIK that has never worked in practice and you always get "leaks" - which will certainly happen with something that people will try to program against.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#83

Post by IncRnd »

kwanbix wrote: post #27
jasim wrote: post #21

One of the original Fox developers wrote a great behind-the-scenes book about the software and the company culture, uptil their acquisition by Microsoft. It is one of the more niche, under-appreciated technology books out there: "FoxTales: Behind the Scenes at Fox Software" by Kerry Nietz FoxPro was originally FoxBase, a clone of dBase III, and in some respects better than dBase - IIRC, it could handle larger files,…

They were bought by Microsoft when they released a version of FoxPro with "rushmore", that made it many times faster than the competion. I still remember the adds. http://www.foxprohistory.org/rushmore.htm

I still remember programming it. Rushmore used bitsets to speed searches or filters, and that speed went from walking to the speed of light.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#85

Post by chaostheory »

teknopaul wrote: post #69
buescher wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Access is a fantastic database modeling and prototyping tool. It just doesn't pay, and there just isn't the tooling for moving Access databases to the web that you'd expect.

Agreed I always thort it wierd that M$ don't have a tool to webify Access and scale it on sqlserver with no dev effort. You could charge what you like for that: if the data got big, the company got big. Great for lock-in. I'm glad, but always surprised, they didn't do it. If they had, appifying Access data would have been an earner a few years later too IMHO. Too late now: cool kids are app natives.

They do now. It's called Power Apps and it's part of Office 365.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#86

Post by kstrauser »

By orders of magnitude, my most popular open source release was a project to help people migrate from FoxPro to PostgreSQL: https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf

FoxPro was cool for desktop apps, but couldn’t make the leap to networked clients, where “networked” was more than “has access to the file share where the database files live”.

In the early 2000s I was hired to write a website that published reports from data stored in a Visual FoxPro database. A not-so-fun fact I learned: the VFP database libraries are single-threaded at the OS level. That is, you couldn’t run more than one query on the same machine at the same time, even in different processes. One would block until another finished. In a fit a panic and madness, I ended up writing an XMLRPC service (“which was the style at the time”) in Python, deploying it to multiple old Windows XP desktops we had laying around, and writing a database adapter for the web server that would send queries to those servers round-robin. Need more parallelism? Add another Windows XP box running my janky little service. It was awful, but it let us ship the project.

Later I wrote pgdbf so that we could run a cron job that would copy all our data out of FoxPro into PostgreSQL so that I could code against a real multi-user database that was vastly better in every way. By accident, I released it at a time when the world was wondering how they were going to migrate from FoxPro to something else. Turns out VFP was wildly popular in South America, and pgdbf turned out to be wildly popular there too, which let to me getting lots of email in Spanish and Portuguese and offers to come talk at user groups. I turned those down because what was I gonna say, “yeah, it was painful for me, too. Anyway, here you go and good luck!”?

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#87

Post by mamcx »

postit wrote: post #35

I think there's still some space for something like fox pro and even access nowadays. Sometimes you just need to solve a problem and that doesn't need to be fancy, specially on the back office.

I think the same, I slowly working towards it. I made a POC of a language here: https://tablam.org.

My idea is add UI building to native controls with Rust and as database sqlite as the default + connectors to others.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#88

Post by mamcx »

kstrauser wrote: post #86

By orders of magnitude, my most popular open source release was a project to help people migrate from FoxPro to PostgreSQL: https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf FoxPro was cool for desktop apps, but couldn’t make the leap to networked clients, where “networked” was more than “has access to the file share where the database files live”. In the early 2000s I was hired to write a website that published reports from data s…

VFP was crippled, like intentionally, by MS. Fox was absolutely superior to Access and SQL Server at the time (ie: as for build productive apps).

But the engine have so many quirks that affect their reliability (I still remember any fox app have the "rebuild indexes" and "fix corruption" in the menu of the app!)

This was purely a ploy, I think. Then Fox was killed and now millions of hours are wasted doing what fox allow in minutes.

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#89

Post by mamcx »

I think is time to revive the spirit of this family of languages.

I'm working solo towards it.

Today things get more complicated because is necessary to cover all major 6 platforms (web, windows, linux, osx, ios, android) to keep the "small bussiness/solo freelancer" friendly usage.

I work in a language that is inspired by fox and by other ideas at https://tablam.org. I will make my first attempt at UI building this year, with the full intention of work across all platform with native controls (plan to render tags in each, not creating a new UI kit!).

Then have sqlite as the default db, then connectors for others.

Wanna join? Is fun!

Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)

#90

Post by teh_klev »

jasim wrote: post #42
teh_klev wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bad acquisitions were another one, with Borland buying dBase and Microsoft buying FoxBase Amen. Add also Nantucket (Clipper) being acquired by CA (Computer Associates) which pretty much killed Clipper.

Quick shoutout to xHarbour and Harbour - the open-source, commercially-supported versions of Clipper. https://github.com/harbour/core The projects are still going strong and many years ago I had ported a huge Clipper project into Harbour and had it working well across a 20 node network with both Clipper and Harbour binaries working simultaneously on the same database. These days every time I make another web applicat…

Thanks for posting. I was a Clipper app developer in the 80's and early 90's, and seeing my old friends TBColumn() and TBrowse() just gave me a rush of nostalgia :)
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