Comments on: yag reaffirms VFP Roadmap http://rickschummer.com/blog2/2007/03/yag-reaffirms-vfp-roadmap/ Shedding some light on topics of software development, Visual FoxPro, saving our planet, paying it forward, and anything else I find important enough to share. Sun, 13 Jan 2019 18:50:16 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.3 By: Rick Schummer http://rickschummer.com/blog2/2007/03/yag-reaffirms-vfp-roadmap/comment-page-1/#comment-866 Rick Schummer Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:58:04 +0000 http://rickschummer.com/blog2/2007/03/yag-reaffirms-vfp-roadmap/#comment-866 The question of staying or leaving is a personal one for each business. It is impossible for me to understand the investment in the existing software and what it would cost to move to a new platform or language without an exhaustive review. This matters when I make recommendations on this issue.<br /><br />That said, here is my general feeling of the stay or rewrite as food for thought. If you rewrite today and it would cost X to do it, what would it cost to do the same say 5 years from now? Hard to answer, but my guess is that the players in the dev language and tools market will be advanced from where they are today. What if in 5 years it costs half of X to develop with the new stuff. Is it worth X/2 to wait and do it with more state of the art tools? Will the maintenance to get 5 more years cost more or less. What is the real cost benefit analysis?<br /><br />So much has changed in the last 5 and 10 years with progress and complexity that the apps we build today make the ones we built yesterday seem so archaic. The same will be true in five more years.<br /><br />The other thing I look at today is the investment of learning something new, and what my return on that investment will be in five years. Will the tools I invest in (commercial or open source) be around in 5 years? The way vendors are deprecating technologies is a huge concern to me. With VFP I know nothing else is going to be deprecated or changed, and I have a library of solid code and framework to last me a long time. <br /><br />We live in interesting times. The question of staying or leaving is a personal one for each business. It is impossible for me to understand the investment in the existing software and what it would cost to move to a new platform or language without an exhaustive review. This matters when I make recommendations on this issue.

That said, here is my general feeling of the stay or rewrite as food for thought. If you rewrite today and it would cost X to do it, what would it cost to do the same say 5 years from now? Hard to answer, but my guess is that the players in the dev language and tools market will be advanced from where they are today. What if in 5 years it costs half of X to develop with the new stuff. Is it worth X/2 to wait and do it with more state of the art tools? Will the maintenance to get 5 more years cost more or less. What is the real cost benefit analysis?

So much has changed in the last 5 and 10 years with progress and complexity that the apps we build today make the ones we built yesterday seem so archaic. The same will be true in five more years.

The other thing I look at today is the investment of learning something new, and what my return on that investment will be in five years. Will the tools I invest in (commercial or open source) be around in 5 years? The way vendors are deprecating technologies is a huge concern to me. With VFP I know nothing else is going to be deprecated or changed, and I have a library of solid code and framework to last me a long time.

We live in interesting times.

]]> By: Victor http://rickschummer.com/blog2/2007/03/yag-reaffirms-vfp-roadmap/comment-page-1/#comment-867 Victor Tue, 21 Apr 2009 02:45:00 +0000 http://rickschummer.com/blog2/2007/03/yag-reaffirms-vfp-roadmap/#comment-867 Hi Rick, I know this is an old message, but I need to write a report to my manager recommending or not to continue developing in Fox.<br /><br />According nowadays realities, what would you say as expert?, Should a Costa Rica based company moves to other language or stay in fox?<br /><br />Our company built huge software with fox 9 and every day is harder to find developers that know the language. Besides this situation, our costumer used to ask, why not .net or Java?<br /><br />Best Regards, Victor.<br />not Hi Rick, I know this is an old message, but I need to write a report to my manager recommending or not to continue developing in Fox.

According nowadays realities, what would you say as expert?, Should a Costa Rica based company moves to other language or stay in fox?

Our company built huge software with fox 9 and every day is harder to find developers that know the language. Besides this situation, our costumer used to ask, why not .net or Java?

Best Regards, Victor.
not

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