Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!spool.mu.edu!munnari.oz.au!uhccux!bigtuna!pegasus!tleylan
From: tleylan@pegasus.com (Tom Leylan)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: Clipper 5.01 bugs
Message-ID: <1991May17.211857.18269@pegasus.com>
Date: 17 May 91 21:18:57 GMT
References: <1991May14.170431.1509@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1991May15.210031.23270@pegasus.com> <24450@gremlin.nrtc.northrop.com>
Organization: Pegasus,  Honolulu
Lines: 32

In article <24450@gremlin.nrtc.northrop.com> maurit@nrtc.nrtc.northrop.com (Mark Aurit) writes:
>remain solvent. However, from the standpoint that A-T was hemorraging and that
>the pickings were ripe for the other guys, they have certainly "blown" it
>in that many customers are not happy with 5.0 and I doubt if it will them many
>new ones. "Hey guys, lookit this slick new software, its harder to user and
>buggier than the old one."
>>
Mark,

Just to clarify things a bit, at no point did Nantucket entertain the idea
that the typical dBASE user was a potential Clipper developer.  There is no
interactive front end to Clipper (as you know) and one would have to be
blind to believe that a group that typically resists explicit declaration
of variables as PUBLIC or PRIVATE is going to embrace the concepts behind
LOCAL and STATIC declarations.  Anybody who would issue a CLEAR ALL command
in an application doesn't understand multi-programmer projects and the
inherent problems that constructs like that introduce.

Nantucket isn't blind, their development group aren't incapable of writing
dBASE IV, the prefer not to.  I sat in Larry Heimendinger's office and told
him to expect to lose the low-end dBASE user who only used Clipper as a
"packager" to compile their final dBASE III application.  I believe that
they will gain from the top end however, the programmers who could write the
app in C or Pascal but for various reasons (usually productivity) they will
choose to use Clipper now.  Those people would not use dBASE because it is
seriously flawed as a language (not necessarily flawed as a tool however).

BTW, the sales figures for Clipper completely counter your hypothesis that
sales are waining.  Personally I don't care what product anybody uses but
I don't like people to base their decisions on misleading information.

tom