FILEPRO ON WIKIPEDA!!!

[Mike Schwartz (PC Support & Services, Appleton, WI)]

On Thu, February 2, 2006 12:40, Christopher Yerry wrote:
> I would like to know how anyone (If anyone) shares
> development tasks in a team environment or do we all
> just DO IT ALL Ourselves.
> It is worth noting filePro is unlike anything else in
> methodology which is both good and bad - but that is
> what makes it filePro, so the learning curve is large
> coming from the MS .NET and java environments. Must of
> us learned this 20 years ago when filePro was "cutting
> edge" so I do not expect great reviews from "seasoned"
> programmers.
>
> Christopher Yerry
> Pres CM Software

     I do filePro development across a wide spectrum of customers, from
small mom & pop operations, to very large corporations, where I work
with 6 to 10 filePro developers on staff.  The largest of these has
about 25 filePro developers on staff, but they are all scientists who
have been trained in filePro and build applications using the massive
corporate databases for their own use.  Most of these locations are
still doing active filePro development.

     For the larger staffs, we use additional development tools, like CVS
to check out progam modules when we need to work on them.

     If you would like my suggestions about implimenting filePro in a
large corporate environment or if you would like my suggestions on
working with a team of filePro developers, I'd be happy to discuss
them with you.  If there are enough people interested, I'd even be
willing to do a presentation at the next filePro conference.

     Just for the record, I was also (somewhat) involved with the same
company that Jeremy was involved with.  The filePro files were
originally written over 20 years ago by the people who started the
company and none of them were trained programmers, yet they managed
to put together an accounting system that had been workable for the
company for over 20 years.  I have several customers who started out
in the same manner and then eventually hired me to assist them.

     Most trained programmers would smile at the filePro code Jeremy had
to work with.  As I recall, there weren't 1000 lines of code in the
whole system, and the company owners never discovered several of the
tricks of the trade, such as having users "stand in" a data entry
file and update master records from that file.  (As is explained in
the current fP tutorials).

     I started to get involved just as the president of the company was
retiring, and he wanted me to come in and start cleaning up the
programs and updating them.  Shortly after that, they hired Jeremy,
and I had a couple of long phone conversations with him, telling him
about the training that STN and others offered, and offering to tutor
him on filePro.  At one point I even offered to fly over to
Minneapolis at my own expense in order to discuss filePro with him
and give him my suggestions about what to do with their accounting
system; even if that would end up being suggestions about how to
export filePro files into SQL or whatever else Jeremy was comfortable
with.  I actually did make one trip over there (mostly at my expense,
I paid the for my plane expenses and they put me up in a motel)
because the lady I had been working with over there was getting
married and quitting, and Jeremy was just in the process of being
hired at that point.

     None of this changed Jeremy's mind about filePro.  I don't like to
get into these Ford vs. Chevy debates, because one programmer will
argue that he HAS to work with Oracle because he needs
multi-dimentional arrays or transaction rollbacks, and another will
argue that he will ONLY work with free GPL versions of SQL, because
that's what he believes in.  ALL arguments miss the point that
filePro is still out in the world and it can still be a very useful
tool.

     I just mention this so that Jeremy and others can't say that he
wasn't offered any other options as far as solving his filePro
problems.

Mike Schwartz