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April Fool's and VFP

OK - I hope everyone had a blast yesterday with the various jokes that went around although I have to say I think Doug's hit a little too close to home.  Before I read his, I was even tempted to post one that said "Microsoft was giving up on Visual Basic and introducing a USE statement into Visual C#". But after seeing his (the clincher was the WSYP feature), I figured I would stay out of it.

I always think of the best April fool's jokes as having a few qualities:

1) Possible yet extremely unlikely
2) Ludicrous expectations (as in with Virgle)
3) Absolutely no way no how (as with the Google Flush for WiFi)

Even Craig Bailey's old one (that wasn't posted on April 1) did make me think (along the above lines).

But I could see a lot of people looking at Doug's post thinking it was the truth without thinking of the actual date, especially since he announced Stonefield Query 3.2 was released right after that. 

Why? Well, even though most of us are pretty clear on the fact that MS won't be doing a VFP 10, there are a lot of people who still think that if we push hard enough, they will (note: they won't).

He definitely got a lot of people with it.

Then when you go skulking around, you find from Tod that FoxPro a Big Hit in China

That's not really "new" news (read his comments for more details on it) - but it is interesting when you think of the huge interest and following VFP has around Europe and Asia.

In the world-wide VFP community, there is still a lot to do. We may have slipped to #19 on the TIOBE index but we're still in the top 20 and we haven't really started to really push on what's possible with VFP X (to say nothing of Craig Boyd's ambitious VFP Studio project).

We may never be able to get MS to reconsider a VFP 10 - but that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to show that FoxPro can compete in a DotNet, 2GB+ world in its current (and future VFPX) forms, not as a dying tool but as a tool that can hold its own.
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Doug Hennig said…
There were two giveaways in my blog post: the WSYP link and "They expect to release VFP 10 on this day next year". I debated making it even more obvious, but my favorite April Fool's jokes are the ones that are possible yet if you think about them, you get the joke. IOW, at least slightly subtle.
April 2, 2008 at 11:14 AM
Andrew MacNeill said…
I missed that other one ("this day next year").

They were pretty good if a little close to home
April 2, 2008 at 12:29 PM
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