Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also excellent built-in documentation, complete with samples and F1 context help. I pretty much learned FoxPro from scratch entirely from it.
how did we go from excellent software, with excellent documentation, that made regular people implement solutions, to the current situation?
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)
#102Great 80s video teaching an office worker to use DBASE 3 https://youtu.be/j0ng2Tp01Hc 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).
It was an awesome time. Folks laugh at all of the tech now, but QuickBasic 4.5, Turbo C++, and dBase were amazing tools for building stuff that was very cool at the time.
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#103Great 80s video teaching an office worker to use DBASE 3 https://youtu.be/j0ng2Tp01Hc 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).
Wow! That was a nostalgia moment. My first professional gig was in 1988 when I took over writing dBase code for an NSF sponsored evaluation project. That taught me enough to work internationally for USAID writing dbBase code for all kinds of projects around the world, and still make it back to the US in time to catch the beginning of the dotCom boom, Linux, and all of the other great stuff over the past 30+ years. It…
Businesses have managed to fill this with some (sometimes crazy and fragile) uses of excel, the larger with over complicated ERP and entprise systems, and what not but the late 80s and early 90s were the hayday for the best tooling for this sort of thing. The Golden Era for the hacker sort, building a quick and effective system without anything fancy or boilerplate or requiring the equivalent to a CS degree.
The software that makes software without having to fully know programming has always been the pipe dream product I guess. Many have failed down this route.
The sort of incentive where every simple CRUD app eventually turns into a CMS. Or how B2B software just becoming data managling pipelines (like Zapier), each slightly customized for every industry and plugging into their wider system. There's probably a few small set of archetypes all software fits into, these being two I've come across most often in my career.
There's always plenty of overlap at a high abstraction like that with all of these apps, but the devil (and money) is often in the details (ie, making it accessible and relevant to their business use case with proper sales, documentation, and design).
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be interesting to get that statement, because .NET original plan was to be what WinRT is. A improvement over the COM runtime with better tooling, but then they pivoted the idea with J++, and had to reboot it with .NET for the reasons we all know. https://msdnshared.blob.core.windows.net/media/MSDNBlogsFS/p...
The article I read years ago. I could not find that article, I found a similar one. https://visualstudiomagazine.com/blogs/desmond-file/2007/03/...
"Confessions of a Used Programming Language SalesmanGetting the Masses Hooked on Haskell"
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.72...
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#105The 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…
> Heck, a lot of what we make way too much money with is basically "just" polishing that. No one wants to admit it, but 80% of "Enterprise IT" revolves around "CRUD app on top of a database". The other 20% mainly revolves around either running reports off the data in that database or interfacing it with some other system. Been this way for decades.
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
FileMaker's quiet, sustained success over the years makes you wonder why Microsoft didn't spin off FoxPro in the same way that Apple spun off Claris. Perhaps they were worried it would be too competitive with their own core products?
They have Microsoft Access, which is the sort of spiritual heir to FoxPro, and is bundled with higher tiers of Microsoft Office. Access has lots of users across industries.
Access is bundled with 'Pro' editions of Office and [Office] 365 Business Standard.
Wikipedia has an interesting account of how post-acquisition FoxPro and Access were developed in parallel. Looking at both[1], it seems that the critical point was when Office 2007 was being developed, when Access got a new file format (presumably making it future-ready). FoxPro's demise was announced shortly after Office 2007 was released, although it was supported till Jan 2015.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Access ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_FoxPro
Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#107Re: Microsoft's FoxPro 2.5 Is Fast and Easy to Use (1993)
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Think of web content in a CMS. All the assets are in a database and they get spat out through a pipeline giving a formatted end result. I've never written a book in a DBMS(!) but it seems plausible.