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Comment by signal11 | Hacker News Reader

> The whole xBase/Clipper-verse almost seems like a unique dead end, in an industry that keeps pretty much every other technology afloat.

Interestingly Claris's FileMaker is still in business: https://www.claris.com/filemaker/pro/

And of course many editions of MS Office include Microsoft Access, which undoubtedly had a role to play in killing dBase, Borland’s Paradox, and Lotus’s Approach.

Access’s not quite as pervasive as Excel but I'm sure a bunch of VBA die-hards in various industries still use it, at least for prototyping.

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Note that Claris/FileMaker is a subsidiary of Apple.

FileMaker's quiet, sustained success over the years makes you wonder why Microsoft didn't spin off FoxPro in the same way that Apple spun off Claris. Perhaps they were worried it would be too competitive with their own core products?

> why Microsoft didn't spin off FoxPro in the same way

They have Microsoft Access, which is the sort of spiritual heir to FoxPro, and is bundled with higher tiers of Microsoft Office. Access has lots of users across industries.

Access is bundled with 'Pro' editions of Office and [Office] 365 Business Standard.

Wikipedia has an interesting account of how post-acquisition FoxPro and Access were developed in parallel. Looking at both[1], it seems that the critical point was when Office 2007 was being developed, when Access got a new file format (presumably making it future-ready). FoxPro's demise was announced shortly after Office 2007 was released, although it was supported till Jan 2015.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Access ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_FoxPro

Are these things really better than just opening a sqlite3 database with python?

In FoxPro, heck even in Access you can easily add a GUI frontend to your DB without writing any or much code. With python... Good luck.

True. Years ago, some FoxPro developers tried to translate their experience in building apps with FoxPro to python. Check the Dabo project. It appears to be dead, though. https://github.com/dabodev/dabo

Yes. Access is a fantastic database modeling and prototyping tool. It just doesn't pay, and there just isn't the tooling for moving Access databases to the web that you'd expect.

Agreed I always thort it wierd that M$ don't have a tool to webify Access and scale it on sqlserver with no dev effort. You could charge what you like for that: if the data got big, the company got big. Great for lock-in. I'm glad, but always surprised, they didn't do it. If they had, appifying Access data would have been an earner a few years later too IMHO. Too late now: cool kids are app natives.

Have a look at the M365 Power Platform and Microsoft Dataverse.

Access does have a "Convert To SQL Server" button (though they never got the web stuff going)

They do now. It's called Power Apps and it's part of Office 365.

As others are pointing out, they have such a thing now in Power Apps (including "appifying") and the extended Power family.

But it's also not like Microsoft stopped trying to build such tools, they've had many fits and starts as priorities shifted and fads arrived and then faded away.

InfoPath tried to be it for the XML world (and preferably the XML world hosted by SharePoint).

SharePoint itself has always dabbled in trying to be a company's low dev solution for a lot information management/database stuff. The low dev stuff some companies have done in SharePoint Lists, for example, is wild. (A lot of the reason developers fear/hate SharePoint is the exact same "things I've seen" feeling from Access, with the added fun of upgrade issues of any modern CMS like WordPress. For most of its life Access maintained a lot of compatibility between versions until it stopped and changed file formats three times in a couple versions.)

I tried appifying my sharepoint lists and it really didn't give a better user experience than just running the sharepoint app on my phone.

Since 2010 you could deploy Access as a web app to Sharepoint. It probably still works.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/build-and-publish...

Also you can use Access as a frontend to any ODBC database such as Postgres.

Yeah, in theory. Really, it would be fantastic to be able to develop CRUD web apps as quickly as Access allows desktop CRUD development.

It's about the UI capabilities you are getting.

absolutely, I'm a die hard Linux/Unix fan, but the one tool I miss from Microsoft land is Access. The code is horrible, scale is a dead end, its expensive, clunky ugly and inflexible. But you can go from db schema and data, to forms and reports with unparalleled speed.

That use case is so common.

I haven't built an app on Access for years soley because M$ decided it should not be a part of the office bundle. But I have never found a replacement.

For my own data I use flat files and better bash. but I can't hand that over to Mum and Pop as a solution.

I've kind of gone to django with the built-in admin for this use-case.

It's not as quick as access to get up and running - but you get the benefit of it being a very well known and supported platform - any bells and whistles you want can be pulled in, you can deploy it online or on a raspberry pi easily enough...

Access is essentially a GUI on top of random database system (so long as you have ODBC driver or later ADO driver, it could use it).

You can build impressive applications with it, and frankly it took web-first development era to do anything to it.

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