"Visual FoxPro 9.0: Still Here, Still Relevant" (Article: David T. Anderson):

by David T. Anderson

Highlights from the article:

While it may be true that managed code and strict compilers can result in "safer," less buggy, and more durable code, a single FoxPro developer can write a full-blown desktop or Web application in a comparatively short amount of time. The effort required to deal with complexity is left primarily to implementing application and business logic, not trying to understand a massive framework or wrestle with data binding.

So why should you care about a product that receives only the occasional nod from its maker? Because, Visual FoxPro is still here and it is still relevant. It serves a need that is underserved by any other single product in its category. Further, because of its ability to run on cheaper, older hardware, run legacy code, and still do everything a modern programming language is expected to do, it will remain the product of choice for renegade workgroups, small resource-constrained offices, independent software developers, and many governments and government-run agencies.

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For FoxPro developers, Fox has simply been a safe application development path; your investment in the technology was not compromised by innovations made by the vendor. Unfortunately, the same can no longer be said with regard to marketing or other products made by the same vendor. This has lead to today's misconceptions about FoxPro and its place in the developer's world.

VFP will not become a .NET language. This was considered heavily during the VFP7 timeframe, but the changes would have resulted in a language that, at best, could not maintain its backward-compatibility and at worse, lose its powerful data manipulation capabilities. And the areas that were redundant between the .NET framework and VFP's extensive language and classes would have created more confusion and very well may have lead to an untimely death for the product.

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I asked him if he thought he could have done what he's done in .NET. His response was "I have three .NET developers here that I run rings around."

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It's Still the Choice of Developers with a Significant Investment in Existing Code

"... there are, by my guess, billions of data records stored in FoxPro worldwide and the FoxPro DML is the best way to manage those records. The language is the most approachable language in the programming world and is easily understood by those with minimal skill."

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It's Still the Choice of Managers with Constrained Resources

Garrett Fitzgerald, a VFP MVP says it this way:

"FoxPro has long been the bread and butter for companies that don't want to (or can't) spend the money to chase the latest technology. Mom and Pop stores don't tend to need a .NET/SQL Server solution to run their businesses, and can't justify spending the money to do it correctly. FoxPro is peppy, even on lesser hardware—compare the requirements for both. However, when properly written, Fox apps can (and have) handled data sets up into the 100s of gigs."

It's the Swiss Army Knife of Data-centric Applications

I find that having delivered applications in VFP, I have a grasp of the entire software development process. I understand issues from design to development to maintenance and migration. I understand the ins and outs of database design, object-oriented design, user interface design, business object design, data access layers, COM and Web services, and enterprise design patterns.