The History of FoxPro: Interview with Wayne Ratliff (1986)

Wayne Ratliff, in the late 70s, built a revolutionary piece of tech: a high-level memory-managed language that regular people could use (from early 80s!) to build database-backed user interfaces. That was dBase.

It is the greatest NoCode tool of all times.

The best release of dBase was dBase III Plus. Everything that came after was a trash-fire. dBase was interpreted - you needed the source .PRG to run it. So a couple of folks formed Nantucket and built Clipper Summer 87. It was primarily marketed as a compiler for dBase. But later versions of Clipper became their own language, and remains my most favorite programming language.

In parallel, there was FoxBase, originally a cheaper and then faster version of dBase, which was then turned to FoxPro with its separate command window and output window (thanks to a port to the original Mac GUI which necessitated it). Excellent product, extremely wide adoption for building business applications until FoxPro 2.6 for DOS.

For a detailed history of FoxPro, read FoxTales by Kerry Nietz. Anyone who's used dBase/Clipper/FoxPro would find it deeply enjoyable!

That was a great interview around dbase (EDIT: foxpro does not build on top of dbase I was wrong). I played around a lot with dbase in my early days. It was very cool. I never felt out of my league.

I've seen some of the ugliest yet most functional software done in foxpro. Incredibly easy to build feature rich software that unfortunately looked like dog poop.

Which has let them to either profit enough for a modern rewrite in .net, or disappear.

Most of the shops that moved to .net highly missed how productive they were with tiny teams in foxpro, and how expensive the move to .net had been.

If only foxpro had remained a viable option similar to VB, history might have gone a different way.

You have to respect how productive people were in those time. We really took a dive. Budgets blew up, so did team sizes, and here we are.

Stacks like foxpro and dbase allowed people like my uncle in his basement to start a massive business, or maintain the list of shirts he sent to the dry cleaners.

The company I worked for had this full ERP solution that had many modules, Finances being one if them.

I remember we had DBF and NTX files for indexes and you needed to run a reindexing procedure every morning before all the employees would start using the system.

Once we got a support call claiming one of the users of such module was freaking out because the system was falsely accusing her.

Upon asking for more details we found that the system would stop with the very particular message of “corruption detected” :)

The ultimate fix was to ask everybody to logout and run the reindexing procedure, as always. But this funny story always stuck with me.

FoxPro was nifty in many ways, but nightmarish outside the “single person running the app with the database on their local hard drive” setup. The moment you tried to put the database files on a file share (which is how you used it as a network DB), it was a world of locking pain. And a fun fact: the client libraries were single threaded to the point that you could only run one query at a time per machine. If you had 2 apps running at once, only one of them could be querying at any given time.

Sometimes I wonder if people set up adverts on their own site, but use and ad-blocker themselves and have no idea what the advert script now does to their pages.

There are a lot of resemblances of CRUD Web/app programming to 1980s PC database applications. Including things like many people using high-level frameworks/DSLs/painters for forms and reports, and sometimes getting much better results by being able to write code at a lower level.

Pretty much all the coding we do today could be learned by a 12-year-old. (Product/project/politics experience takes longer, and judgment hasn't fully leveled up yet.)

I can't say what the biggest successes were of Foxpro, but for better or mostly worse, I was exposed to a use of Foxpro which brought a few hundred millions of revenue (and 20%ish percent of profits) based on it.

There was a multi-level-marketing company based out of the Dallas-Fort-Worth area of Texas in the mid 1990s which sold 1/10th ounce gold coins in a pyramid-ish scheme that rose to significant fame in the "home business (MLM)" market.

The compensation scheme was legit in that it operated as advertised. And indeed it made some marketing types very wealthy.

The entire backend, as it was in those days, was based on Foxpro running on a Windows PC.

I recall with amusement that the leader of that company invited me to review his binary tree calculion system to try to improve it. Foxpro wasn't actually the problem. The problem was a grossly inefficient linear system which couldn't manage binary structures with hundreds of braches and thousands of leaves.

To be fair, this system was built buy a guy who was a used car salesman with no formal training. What he accomplished was astonishing, but it was also an abomination.

George Tate realized he wasn't a software developer and cut Ratliff and his team wide slack although he'd make suggestions sometimes based on his learnings with customers.

Ed Esber was a bit more arrogant and saw Ratliff and his crew as nothing more than mere employees. Esber famously told Wayne Ratliff that he was no more important to the company than the people loading the trucks! Ratliff quit and started a competitor. It was the beginning of the end for Ashton-Tate.

Ratliff created a new product that competed with dBase. In many ways it was a superior product but he couldn't market his way out of a paper bag. Meanwhile another competitor out of Perrysburg, Ohio had much more success in the dBase market and was later acquired by Microsoft.

Interview with Wayne Ratliff, author of dBASE (1986) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22382346 - Feb 2020 (16 comments)

There are still millions of SME relying on Visual FoxPro, which had its last release 14 years ago.

I used the el editor to write it. Learning vi afterwards felt like such an upgrade