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. amai · 1790154232 · focus · HN ↗

      > Delphi, Visual FoxPro, Visual Basic, Flash

      All these tools are nice for a single developer. But they fail to scale for teams where you want a distributed version system, automated tests and CI/CD pipelines. Also you want to reuse code via package management systems. And a single code base for several target systems (cross compilation , electron) is also nice. I believe the mentioned tools offer none of this.

      1. regularfry · 1790160966 · focus · HN ↗

         > But they fail to scale for teams where you want a distributed version system, automated tests and CI/CD pipelines.

         I don't think this is true? Certainly you could have done those things with Delphi but it pre-dated DVCS and CI/CD being common concerns.

         > Also you want to reuse code via package management systems.

         Again, these tools pre-dated package management systems being in common use because they pre-date internet access at any sort of bandwidth being a reliable assumption. No reason they couldn't have one. Perl did at the time, which I mainly put down to it being in common use where internet access was a reliable assumption, but very little else did.

         > And a single code base for several target systems (cross compilation , electron) is also nice

         You can absolutely do this with Lazarus, which picked up where Delphi left off. Flash also counts here.

         1. legulere · 1790173145 · focus · HN ↗

            At least FoxPro stores code in binary files, but I’ve seen scripts to convert them back and forth to a text representation that can be checked in.

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