Thread

1. ksec · 1790138328 · focus · HN ↗

   I know there are still a few niche industry that has an industry standard program written in Visual FoxPro, and I remember as pre COVID 2019 they were still using it. ( Edit: I just called and asked, still using it as of 2026 )

   Niche but no small business, commodity with over $400M USD annual revenue, the industry together that is easily $2B+.

   If it is not broke, don't fix it. And there are industry that is extremely conservative in anything software, they will just keep it running for as long as they could.

   I used to be sad that we don't have something better to replace these antique software. Now I have come to appreciate it, mostly because newer software haven't show they have manage to add value in the slightest. And most of the time they simply don't work as well.

   Delphi, Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic, Flash. I used to think one day we will have something that is not only faster, easier and scalable replacement of those. Instead everything went more technical, more complex, enterprisy and non-user friendly.

   And to the Author of the project. Thank You for making it.

   1. pvitz · 1790151911 · focus · HN ↗

      A big software for simulating the economic balance sheets of life insurance companies moved many years ago from using FoxPro under the hood to CSV files and sold it as a huge improvement. I don't think anybody was convinced by that, but vendor lock-in makes companies accept such regressions.

      1. cube00 · 1790165914 · focus · HN ↗

         I was on a project trying to migrate off Oracle and they wanted to just dump all historic data to CSVs.

         I pointed out they'd lose a lot of the integrity and audit features built into a database.

         I get wanting to be free from Oracle but go to another database.

         1. elfly · 1790174530 · focus · HN ↗

            I wonder how that happened.

            Maybe someone proposed Postgres and they said well who is going to support it. And then they'd have to pay some company to show they have postgres support anyway.

            CSV has no support.

      2. taneq · 1790210181 · focus · HN ↗

         I once worked on maintaining an accounting package that exported to csv. At one point there was a bug where if the notation for a transaction included a single unmatched quote, the rest of the exported data silently disappeared.

         The depressing part wasn’t finding this bug (in a very mature codebase), it was painstakingly explaining what the problem was and how to fix it.

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