[HN Gopher] The History of FoxPro: Interview with Wayne Ratliff
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The History of FoxPro: Interview with Wayne Ratliff
Author : susam
Score : 25 points
Date : 2022-09-03 20:54 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.foxprohistory.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.foxprohistory.org)
| abraae wrote:
| Like turbo pascal, a radically easy to use technology that was
| wildly successful at the time, but sank without trace in a few
| years as fashions shifted.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Wow the adverts on this site are intense.
|
| Sometimes I wonder if people set up adverts on their own site,
| but use and ad-blocker themselves and have no idea what the
| advert script now does to their pages.
| kstrauser wrote:
| My Internet claim to fame was writing a program to get people off
| of FoxPro to PostgreSQL: https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf
|
| FoxPro was nifty in many ways, but nightmarish outside the
| "single person running the app with the database on their local
| hard drive" setup. The moment you tried to put the database files
| on a file share (which is how you used it as a network DB), it
| was a world of locking pain. And a fun fact: the client libraries
| were single threaded to the point that you could only run one
| query at a time _per machine_. If you had 2 apps running at once,
| only one of them could be querying at any given time.
| triceratopz wrote:
| The productivity of FoxPro has never been equaled in any software
| since.
| iiiji wrote:
| It's a little known fact that the author has a fursona known as
| 'Barky J. Redtail', and was instrumental in founding some of the
| early furry communities in Ohio.
| [deleted]
| keyle wrote:
| Ah foxpro.
|
| That was a great interview around dbase which I think if I
| remember properly, foxpro builds on top. More like a UI for
| dbase. 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| :)
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