Hacker News users debate FoxPro nostalgia and practical concerns
1Sep 22 5:00 PM · 1d ago · 1 article · 1 post · 3 comments · 2 sources · development 1 of 4
The announcement prompted mixed reactions from former FoxPro developers expressing nostalgia for the language's developer experience while raising concerns about its architectural flaws—network file locking issues, security vulnerabilities in stored procedures, and scalability limitations that pushed many away decades ago.
“FoxDev Studio opens the projects, forms and tables you already have and runs them the way you remember: no rewrite, no conversion, no export step.”
The low barrier to entry, high developer productivity, and bespoke and "highly conforming to proprietary business processes" nature of resulting applications are all really cool, but man, it sucks when one of these systems outgrows the capabilities of the underlying platform.I shudder at the though of businesses trying to access DBF files on…
All these years later, Microsoft Access is still alive and kicking, and just three years ago, the 32bit version got Large Address Aware (LAA) support! Technically my very first software job was writing VBA in Microsoft Access for a few weeks and they're probably still running it (there's no drop in replacement for it or cheap way to migrate away)
My father built several projects in FoxPro. I was too young in the ’90s to remember much of it, but I’m sure he’ll be super happy to check this out. The kicker is that we’ll probably need to buy a floppy disk drive and dust off some old boxes to find them.