20
CLING BLING
Filed Under (Visual FoxPro, work.BLOG) by WildFire on 20-06-2005
No.
Yes… ‘no’.
No… I don’t consider myself clinging to an ‘old technology’ while others are slowly jumping into .new bandwagons that is coming out every now and then.
It’s not an ‘old technology’ in the first place. I see it as a reliable, time-tested and stable solution forged by years of experience, wisdom and lines and lines of codes.
Add speed, efficiency, resource friendliness and backward compatibility.
Plus it respects the developer, and users as well. (Software/application development tools should be… ‘tools’ or ‘slaves’ and not the other way around (software tools enslaving the developer… (but that would be a different story for now))).
But don’t get me wrong.
I’m not claiming that you become a zealot, close your doors and windows when a new technology comes popping up.
This .NET in theory is good. (Same can be said about the other web-and-all-around targeted tools that came before and after this.)
In fact in practice, a lot of good .NET-based applications can be seen already.
Plus there’s this insatiable quest for learning almost every coder encounters. Every now and then that thirst should be satisfied. Even if installing VS.NET 2002 slows down my decent PC while Visual Foxpro 8 runs so well and so swiftly on my other AMD 500MHz machine.
Even if upgrading TheFramework renders the applications developed in the old framework useless and broken.
But the essence of developers and programmers and whatever you call yourself are solutions. The best solutions if possible.
If you’re going to a friend who’s just five kilometers away from you, with no bodies of water separating you and you’re not living in a floating glacier or something… then using an airplane as a means of transportation is an overkill, if not crazy.
You can even ride a dog, a horse or my pet tiger, a bike or a medieval cannon and convert yourself into a cannonball.
Of course you can always take an airplane… but then you have to build a runway first, which will take, let’s say just for the sake of discussion, around 2 kilometers and another 2 kilometers in your friend’s place. And if you build these two runways where it is located between point A (Your place) and point B (Your friend’s place) that would leave just 1 kilometer of travel span and no way can an airplane travel that distance.
Even if you’ll find a way, to build the runway and the airplane in such a way that you can still travel for five kilometers… it still is a major overkill.
We’re not even considering the resources spent, the red tapes you’ll get into… the time wasted and all.
Unless you’re still sticking to defending the airplane path and decide on waiting for that hovercraft driven by a scantily clad cyborg that looks like Cleopatra with vertical landing and take off features to come out in the market.
We can argue endlessly but still, the best path/solution to use in this situation is either to use a car, a bike, a scooter or you can opt to walk instead of clinging statically to the high tech resource-hoggin’ ideas and solutions.
(And btw airplane+skydive is out of the equation.)
Point is… past, present and even future, there will always be a place for Visual FoxPro.
And some things are best solved using the simplest, most reliable, time-tested, fast and resource-friendly tools.
If not all.