Home » Uncategorized » Sedna – What’s In a Name?
Jun
03

I have watched with curiosity how the Fox Community is reacting to the announced code name for the next version of VFP. Sure it is fun listening to the various reactions from the community about the Roadmap, but lets have a little fun with “Sedna”.

In my post VFP Roadmap provides direction I note:

“Sedna is not yet classified as a planet, but speculation is it is orbiting the sun in an elliptical orbit, which takes 10,500 earth years to orbit the sun. If you are a space geek like me, you might find this Sedna page quite interesting.”

There were four things that came to mind when I read about the celestial object and the code name of VFP.Next…

  1. Pluto is the ninth planet and Sedna is past the ninth planet. Sedna in the VFP world is past the ninth version (this is the obvious one that Ken confirmed yesterday is the base of the code name).
  2. If you look at the Sedna page you will see 2003 VB12 was the official temporary designation of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Minor Planet Center. So we could make a correlation that the add-on to VFP 9 is equivalent to VB v12.0 (this one was just too much fun).
  3. The other fun conspiracy theory is Sedna is a red object and VFP is the red-headed stepchild in the Microsoft Developer Tool Division.
  4. Finally, Sedona was the code name for VFP 7, take the “Oh” out of 7 and you get Sedna.

According to a post on the UniversalThread, Ken Levy says only the first observation is correct and later John Koziol (lead tester on the Fox Team) admits to being the originator of the code name:

“With Ken’s approval, the “Sedna” idea was mine :-) At first, the name was attractive as the first planetary body beyond the 9th (Pluto)…and then I read the legend of Sedna, the Artic goddess and about fell off my chair laughing at the loose parallels to VFP.”

In a later post John hints there are many other reasons Sedna is a great name and they will become apparent as time goes on. Well, geeks just gotta have fun. OK, back to work.

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