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Posted by boredjohnny 1 hour ago

Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived(foxscript.org)
58 points | 31 comments
kstrauser 3 minutes ago|
Hey, I got to mention this recently! One of my bizarre claims to fame was writing this little tool[0] a few employers back to convert Visual FoxPro database files to PostgreSQL as part of a migration. For a while we had to run it as a cron job so that people could to data entry in an old VFP app but others could run fast reports on our web app with a postgres backend. It wasn't pretty, but it worked great and helped us get off that ancient stack.

[0]https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf

zero_shift 2 minutes ago||
Give the fact this project sprung out of nowhere an hour ago, has one commit and no obvious history beyond that - I must ask, was this vibe-coded?
EvanAnderson 30 minutes ago||
The low barrier to entry, high developer productivity, and bespoke and "highly conforming to proprietary business processes" nature of resulting applications are all really cool, but man, it sucks when one of these systems outgrows the capabilities of the underlying platform.

I shudder at the though of businesses trying to access DBF files on "network drives" across the variety of shitty overlay network technologies that are the norm today. Seamless remote access to applications is the exact recipe Visual FoxPro apps fail at.

It looks cool but I wouldn't want actually work around apps built in it. It would be cool if a client/server database could be transparently shoehorned in to it.

fragmede 37 seconds ago|
> it sucks when one of these systems outgrows the capabilities of the underlying platform.

It did, but does it still with AI? Back in the 90's it was crazy painful. I'm not in the same situations as I was back then, but I'm optimistic about the future being better because we have better tools today than we did back then.

ang_cire 34 minutes ago||
I loved visual fox pro as a kid (~10). I made little UIs to open my favorite sites and files.
jordand 21 minutes ago||
All these years later, Microsoft Access is still alive and kicking, and just three years ago, the 32bit version got Large Address Aware (LAA) support! Technically my very first software job was writing VBA in Microsoft Access for a few weeks and they're probably still running it (there's no drop in replacement for it or cheap way to migrate away)
post-it 17 minutes ago|
Access is so good. I can't believe there's no universal equivalent for Linux and Mac. There are dozens of times when I've used a spreadsheet when a file-based database would have been better.
nullsmack 14 minutes ago||
I'm shocked in general at the lack of open source Rapid Application Development software.
AshamedCaptain 7 minutes ago|||
There have been shitloads of open source RADs. They do not generate much interest.
markus_zhang 11 minutes ago|||
Probably because *nix programmers in general are the black coffee long beard RTFM type.
meerita 35 minutes ago||
My father built several projects in FoxPro. I was too young in the ’90s to remember much of it, but I’m sure he’ll be super happy to check this out. The kicker is that we’ll probably need to buy a floppy disk drive and dust off some old boxes to find them.
jermaustin1 23 minutes ago||
My first real job was 2006, turning a Visual FoxPro application into a Web Application using ASP.Net 1.1 Web Forms and VB.Net.

With that said, I've never actually used FoxPro. I only had a database as the contract for what my web app was supposed to do.

markus_zhang 20 minutes ago||
Our high school taught FOXBASE and I immediately fell for it. I didn’t make anything real with it, though, but it was my first official language and I dreamed big back then.
devy 28 minutes ago||
This is awesome! Having had to deal with ancient file formats knowing that there are renewed tooling that's not binding to legacy OSes that you can't no longer find viably is great.

Now, who's open sourcing and reviving FileMaker that Apple killed?

daotoad 3 minutes ago|
Apple still sells Filemaker.

https://www.claris.com/filemaker/

tombert 33 minutes ago|
I might literally be the only person on earth that can honestly say I have been paid to write FoxPro, Erlang, F#, and ColdFusion.

My first software job was at a Tae Kwan Do studio who ran their own billing department, and the entire billing half was some weird custom thing written with FoxPro. Not Visual FoxPro, I've never actually used that, but the old school DOS stuff.

I absolutely hated every time I had to touch it and I had hoped that it would die in a fire. I hope Visual FoxPro sucks less.

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