alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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Oh boy, do I have some stories. I've worked with many companies that actually still do this today. You'd be amazed at what someone can do with VFP and Citrix - or maybe horrified.
> 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.
We wrote and used a lot of dbf files on a server in a major bank and no problems. Albeit using clipper.
But we had no issues as locking did exist.
The clipper management cam over to the UK to see us and other UK customers. They were shocked to find their small project was doing life critical things for medics and putting thousand of millions of pounds of trades through their code.