It’s kind of cool to see people putting in the effort to learn 30 commands and becoming masters of their own destiny. I guess it’s the same sense of mastery that Excel users have today.
What’s the dBase II/III equivalent today?
Hopefully someone more learned than myself about modern database programming will chime in. I'm not sure what current system offers both the database and development features in such a seamless package. That said, on the Mastodon post for this article, I was told, "Learning dBASE isn't for naught" and was directed to https://xharbour.org/ as a modern dBASE/Clipper implementation. (haven't had a chance to try it yet, personally)
Were those so awful? I remember rather enjoying them when I read them many years ago - though the last book got pretty weird, as 4th-book-in-trilogy installments tend to do.
The main character (Nicole?) was the worst kind of Mary-Sue, with the rest of the characters increasingly taking on the mien of cardboard cutouts flitting around her. Sex became a major theme in a way that, again, might work well with another co-author but clashes with Clarke's palette.
And IIRC, the exploration and revelation of the Ramans loses essentially all of the hard science that grounds Clarke's work generally and Rendezvous in particular and becomes woo-woo spirituality.
Salesforce, firebase or Supabase etc., but, all are SAAS platforms. Not sure if there is any other platform where you can do database and applications that you can host yourself.