alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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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.
> Delphi
Delphi is alive. https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi
> 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.
That is the same experience that I had with manufacturing shops, they just keep using the tool if it works.
> And to the Author of the project. Thank You for making it. My pleasure
I haven't used Delphi since I was a child.
> Niche but no small business, commodity with over $400M USD annual revenue, the industry together that is easily $2B+.
This feels so small in 2026.
>, 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.
A person's perspective on the older dev tools being "superior" to today's newer tools depends on the things they want to build.
I had jobs working on Foxbase/FoxPro for DOS and migrated those apps to FoxPro for Windows, and Visual Basic 3.0 to 6.0 ... and I don't look back at those with the same positive nostalgia.
Classic VB was "simple" but every project at each company had a different hodge podge of 3rd-party VBX/OCX add-on controls to do anything non-trivial. E.g. 3rd-party calendar date picker, report writer, etc. VB didn't have a decent datagrid so everybody bought a 3rd-party one. In contrast, C# WinForms standard controls included a usable datagrid with data binding out of the box.
In a FoxPro for Windows project I was working on, we needed to open .zip files. FoxPro didn't have that functionality so the company paid an extra $300 for the FoxPro Library Construction Kit[1] and I hand-coded a .zip file parser in C Language to be called by FoxPro code. Instead of FoxPro dev work being simple, it's complex! Today's Python or C# can trivially open .zip files with builtin modules and functions so devs don't waste time on writing low-level C code or use 3rd-party libs.
With old 1990s tools, you can't do "simple" tasks such as getting a UTC timestamp, use a regex expression, or retrieve a web page with an http call, etc without calling Win32 API functions or 3rd-party tools.
If one wants to do things beyond the limitations of classic VB/FoxPro, the newer dev tools like Python/C# etc absolutely do make things easier and faster.
[1] https://www.scribd.com/document/384159949/Ms-Foxpro-Develope...