A good history of the start of FoxPro: http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/ftale.htm

I still end up using VFP occasionally to port our older clients to our newer software.

Python/SQLite is almost as productive, you can do some sweet stuff with a few lines of code. Not as REPL, though. Throw in some pandas, IPython and some SQLAlchemy and your are rocking.