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Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived

487 points · 270 comments · boredjohnny

zergrush · 1790114235 · focus · HN ↗
what was foxpro , for younger gen here
1. __d · 1790114561 · focus · HN ↗
  An IDE, form designer, language, runtime, and database engine.
  People used it to write business applications. Like Microsoft Access, or Visual Basic.
  It started as a competitor to dBase II/III called FoxBase, and then Microsoft bought it.
2. neverartful · 1790114562 · focus · HN ↗
  Original - FoxPro: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoxPro" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoxPro
  Successor - Visual FoxPro: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_FoxPro" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_FoxPro
3. wolfi1 · 1790114634 · focus · HN ↗
  a database program, IIRC it was a program not by microsoft but MS bought it and killed it off
  1. whartung · 1790120985 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, they bought it. But they didn’t buy it and stab it in the heart. They developed it for several years.
    A primary bit of tech that came out of the purchase was the core DB engine. They reworked this into what became the Jet engine. The Jet engine was the core of Access.
    Access was in many ways a next generation of FoxPro. They both went after the same niche of desktop and file server DB applications. But FoxPro carried the legacy of its dBase roots, FoxBase was basically “better dBase”, but had to appeal to and be familiar to dBase developers.
    Access had no heritage like that to hold it back, and was a better citizen in the VB/Office/OLE/COM world. It was also more SQL first even though it kept things like DBF files as first class citizens.
4. xattt · 1790116886 · focus · HN ↗
  It was boxed software that, when going to a computer/office store as a child in the mid-1990s, you wanted your parents to buy because it had a fox on the cover and in the name without actually knowing what it did.
  Simply speaking from experience.
5. Kuyawa · 1790121720 · focus · HN ↗
  A tool and language to write apps where you could write "Select * from customers" in the command window and get results right there in a browse table, beautifully
  Not a single language nowadays can do that
6. JSR_FDED · 1790143917 · focus · HN ↗
  Besides being a DB with forms, reports, etc as already mentioned by others - its significance was huge as it was the peak of an era where small/single developers could deliver business solutions by knowing a single tool, and people with domain knowledge could write their own solutions.
  Since then everything became much more complex - networking, security, GUIs, web development, deployment, etc.

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