A VFP Guru's advice for the future (Posting: Whil Hentzen)

Come from this thread:

There are two schools of thought here. The first is to be an expert in a
language, and when the call comes for help in that language, you hold up
your hand and yell, "Pick me! Pick me!"

The other is to be a domain expert (auto parts, insurance, factory
automation, pet store inventory...) and develop 'solutions' for that
domain. The tool(s) you use are (mostly) irrelevant.

I've always been a door #1 kind of guy, fortunate that I can pick up
specific domain knowledge quickly and effectively. I like it because
it's really interesting; on the factory floor with the Archie Bunkers
and Homer Simpsons one day, in the bank's currency exchange back office
with the vapid young pretties the next. Lot of variety.

_MY_ plan (as I've stated in public many a time, although a few
disgruntled folks have chosen to selectively edit what I've said to suit
their own means) is to maintain VFP for years, but not to invest in it.
Rather, spend spare R&D time in a _growing_ market opportunity.

LAMP is the way to go as far as I'm concerned. I see MSFT's attitude and
approach being a losing game. They're nasty and don't offer good value
(anyone out there feel that a Vista upgrade is money well-spent?) The
reason they're still making money is because people don't have much of a
choice.

LAMP offers opportunity and freedom... oh, enough of that soapbox.
What's really compelling about the 'AMP' part is that it's cross
platform. MySQL, PHP and Python (and Apache, actually) all run on
multiple platforms, which is nice, since suddenly your skills are
xferrable.

I'm certain I'll be selling VFP books and doing VFP maintenance in 2020,
but I don't see a big benefit in becoming a Sedna expert. Maintenance
means remembering ON KEY LABEL, not MSFT's du-jour incarnation of COM,
some obscure hook between VFP and something else.