FoxPro/dBase Nostalgia

In the 90s I knew several similar cases where significant companies were run on FoxPro or Access. I don't think there are any web based tools on the market now where you could achieve the same thing with the same level of effort.

What's wrong with dBase, FoxPro and Clipper for that matter?

This is where FoxPro/dbase was the solution. I work with that for some years and none on the current tech match that.Fox was the best part of Acces (the GUI builder, but way better) + a capable embedded database engine + way better language than anything else for businesses apps.This could sound weird, but even python is to hard in contrast with fox. Also, being more database focused, interactive and with decent GUI abilities was a match in heaven.Fox is still pervasive in m

Reminds me of a recent HN post about the uncanny survival of MS Access https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21401198

My father worked on AS/400 applications as a project manager. When they moved to Windows he changed job, but still in the same field. Among his former users, the preferred replacement was Visual FoxPro applications that looked pretty much exactly like the old AS/400 programs---not any newfangled client/server or browser-based thing, even though there were already some available.

I've never used it (and the fact that you need to fill a form to download a demo means that chances are i'll never use it :-P) but judging from the Wikipedia page it looks like it might have been close at some point but somewhere around late 90s/early 2000s it succumbed to the need to excuse its pricepoint and got too overbloated and enterprise-y (i mean, apparently even in 1997 it would act as an FTP server...? :-P).What i have in mind is more like something between dBase and

Such tools existed and were popular in 1990s: DBase, Clipper, FoxPro.They worked pretty well in their domain: data entry and report generation, with lightweight transaction processing and general computation.Then happened the internet and client-server architectures, and these do not map as neatly onto local, single-user, single-transaction tables.

Modern XBase clones like Flagship (Clipper clone, sort of), Harbour project (ditto), and many others come close. You still have to do some programming, but it is not too difficult for an IT-savvy non-programmer to pick up. Clipper apps still run many small businesses in India (I know for sure) and likely many other countries too. Data entry in such apps is extremely fast once the operator gets used to the app. They did have a few useful features like drop-down lists, incremental search in that (

I cut my teeth on dBase II back in the day, and built my first consulting and development company on the back of that, then moving on to Clipper, FoxPro and Clarion and other tools over time. I always managed to skirt around Access whenever it came up in client meetings ("Oh, we have this FREE database thingy that came with our word processing and spreadsheet tools - why don't you use that to write our stock control app??").It has been many years since I have seen Access, and

I don't recall it being particularly esoteric. There were libraries to call various databases. In my first job I converted a vb6 application from Foxpro to SQL server. I was just getting into Ruby on Rails at the time and wrote a COM library the the data layer that was somewhat like activerecord, and ended up using it from ruby scripts. Fun times. Just looked it up and the software still seems to be being sold 20 years later.