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Comment by MycroftJones | Hacker News Reader

I don't, but I'd like to. Most of the online documentation on Foxpro is old, and doesn't convey the magic that I've seen happen with it. I'd love to see some combination of Delphi with Foxpro, probably with LISP syntax and Qt bindings. And a little bit of sugar from haskell and kona languages.

What made Turbo Pascal great was the help system. For every single standard library function, it had a snippet of code that you could cut, paste, run, and tweak.

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FoxPro also had a great help system, including context help with F1 for whatever was under the cursor. It wasn't quite as good as TP, because it didn't have true hyperlinked text - but it had a separate section in each article just for links ("See Also"), and it had very fast keyword search, so it was "good enough" in practice. And yes, also tons of examples!

With the exception of the LISP syntax, I agree with you!

I wanna get a relational / kdb+ / ml hybrid.

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One of the gems of FoxPro was the always-on terminal. It have his own terminal/repl. In the IDE. Always ON. You can do

CREATE FORM name

and open the form as a table

then do

BROWSE

and see how was made. And you could activa the terminal on a shipped app, so you can fix things on the fly.

And the debugger (specially the var windows) was good. To date, no single debugger/var window have bees as good as was with Visual FoxPro.

I'd love to hear more about your thoughts on this. I couldn't find an email address in your profile, but I have an address in mine, so please shoot me an email.

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