rhe LA Fox Develoner Newsletter

June 1994

XPro User Group News (Con’t from Page 5)

purchasers are more influenced by advertising

than the average xBase developer.

3.

If some MIS department after attending a few

presentations decides on a single product. Any

product even FP. They should be summarily

dismissed. There are so many products out there

and so many user requirements that any product

will be the wrong choice for some of them. So it

takes 3 weeks to develope a project that should

have taken 3 days. In a huge corporate organiza-

tion or a mega government organization it doesn’t

make a difference. To a 15 person company it can

break them. FP has its place, PB has its place,

Access has its place, VB has its place a large

organization should use ALL of them. They fill

different niches. I have worked on numerous large

corporate projects that cost hundreds of thousands

of dollars of programmer time. Using the wrong

product for the few of these per year that a large

MIS shop will be doing could result in millions per

year in over expenditures. If the company grosses

a few billion who will know?

4.

For fun I spent a 100 hours or so learning VB

and then did a small app. You can take a app that

should take 90 minutes with FoxExpress and

another 30 minutes to do the reporting with

FoxFire! and write it in VB in a couple of weeks. It

won’t have the field level validation that FP does

so well. You won’t have the flexibility of having

your users do their own reports as FoxFire! does

so well. And if your user enters a bunch of records

say 20 to 100 thousand you won’t have acceptable

performance. But you will have a VB app. OTOH

there are places where VB is very useful. Each

project needs to be evaluated as to what is

needed and then the tool chosen.

5.

Remember a scant two years ago the MIS types

were saying COBAL is the only way to develop

industrial strength apps. 18 months ago they were

saying MainFrames will be the backbone of the

corporate environment for the forseeable future.

xBase has been the “garlic” and “Wooden Stake”

to these vampires for almost a decade. (Anything

but xBase).

6.

A relatively small company I forget who (AT&T?

It has been reported here in the fora) who do a

measly 20 + billion per year have committed their

least important function (accounting) to a modified

SBT package that runs under FP. Give me a break.

FP will be around for a while. It will evolve. Great. It

won’t look like it does now. FP as it is now used bears

no resemblance to FB+. The two languages share a

few commands that work in a similar manner.

7.

I just got my catalog form Programmer’s Paradise.

They have an interview with Rodger Heinen senior vp

of Database and Development tools of MSFT. In the

first two paragraphs he mentions FP twice. To quote

“With products like FoxPro you can build line-of-

business applications....” “Likewise, FoxPro is the

only database development tool that provides full

Windows, Mac and MS~DOS support.”

8.

Think that the xBase language is carrying some

baggage around. Take a simple add, edit delete

screen with field level validation and record locking

and rewrite it in VB. The first 90% will be a snap the

rest of it will take longer than you can ever imagine.

VB has some baggage that is just as frustrating. Also

plan on a good $1,000.00 for third party addons to

make VB work.

SUBJECT:

HUMOUR

Here’s something that drifted into my mailbox from the

Internet. Thought you might enjoy it.

Electrical Engineering vs. Computer Science

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a

king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He

showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in

the top, a control knob, and a lever. “What do you

think this is?”

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. “It is a

toaster,” he said. The king asked, “How would you

design an embedded computer for it?” The engineer

replied, “Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write

a simple program that reads the darkness knob and

quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness,

from snow white to coal black. The program would

use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element

table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the

heating elements and start the timer with the initial

value selected from the table. At the end of the time

delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast.

Come back next week, and I’ll show you a working

prototype.”

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately

(Con’t, Page 7)

Page 6