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Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

The low barrier to entry, high developer productivity, and bespoke and "highly conforming to proprietary business processes" nature of resulting applications are all really cool, but man, it sucks when one of these systems outgrows the capabilities of the underlying platform.

I shudder at the though of businesses trying to access DBF files on "network drives" across the variety of shitty overlay network technologies that are the norm today. Seamless remote access to applications is the exact recipe Visual FoxPro apps fail at.

It looks cool but I wouldn't want actually work around apps built in it. It would be cool if a client/server database could be transparently shoehorned in to it.

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We wrote and used a lot of dbf files on a server in a major bank and no problems. Albeit using clipper.

But we had no issues as locking did exist.

The clipper management cam over to the UK to see us and other UK customers. They were shocked to find their small project was doing life critical things for medics and putting thousand of millions of pounds of trades through their code.

Three questions:

* How plug-and-play is compiling dBASE code in Clipper? Compiles and runs immediately, needs minor edits, or more work than that?

* How much of a speed improvement does compiling provide?

* How grateful were clients for the speed improvement?

Probably plug and play except the indicies are a different file type.

Speed I can't rememeber (it was 40 years ago) then again the speed of a dbase etc program is limited by disk access

It was an internal system so no real comparison.

I do not think we converted much from dBase to Clipper, I assume the first programs did before I joined but by that time we had in house libraries etc.

Oh boy, do I have some stories. I've worked with many companies that actually still do this today. You'd be amazed at what someone can do with VFP and Citrix - or maybe horrified.

The only Citrix Metaframe (and later Windows Terminal Server) machines I ever deployed in Real Life were because of shared-file database-based applications.

> it sucks when one of these systems outgrows the capabilities of the underlying platform.

It did, but does it still with AI? Back in the 90's it was crazy painful. I'm not in the same situations as I was back then, but I'm optimistic about the future being better because we have better tools today than we did back then.

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