Wondering - Clipper 5.x Developer

[r***@alice.net]

Hey all, I've recently retired and have a lot of recent Clipper (5.2) and xcode experience from maintaining the legacy systems at my former company. I'm wondering if there's still a need in the real world for us old guys, maybe doing emergency fixes, upgrades or short term project work, from home. Is this the place to keep up with that? Thanks in advance! - Rc.

[Mr. Man-wai Chang]

Post by r***@alice.net
Hey all, I've recently retired and have a lot of recent Clipper (5.2) and xcode experience from maintaining the legacy systems at my former company. I'm wondering if there's still a need in the real world for us old guys, maybe doing emergency fixes, upgrades or short term project work, from home. Is this the place to keep up with that? Thanks in advance! - Rc.

You got an updated list of clients that are **still** using Clipper/DOS
applications in your city or country? :)

[dlzc]

Post by r***@alice.net
Hey all, I've recently retired and have a lot of
recent Clipper (5.2) and xcode experience from
maintaining the legacy systems at my former
company.

The current dBase variant effort is X#, and there are announcements at comp.lang.clipper.visual-objects, for a better newsgroup for X#. If you want to see what the language has become, and what an IDE for it could look like.

Post by r***@alice.net
I'm wondering if there's still a need in the real
world for us old guys, maybe doing emergency
fixes, upgrades or short term project work, from
home.

That "need" disappeared at least 5 years ago. But there is more to learn, to keep your skills (and mind) from atrophying.

Post by r***@alice.net
Is this the place to keep up with that? Thanks
in advance!

There are a few "old guys" working at these language variants:
- Harbour (it has its own newsgroup)
- xHarbour (comp.lang.xharbour)
- Visual Objects / Vulcan (comp.lang.clipper.visual-objects)
- X#

X# helps the future of the language.

Harbour has finally accepted wide characters, so can display native fonts on-screen, xHarbour has not (yet). Both of these are closer to what Clipper 5.2 and 5.3 grew to be. These products are largely free, but xHarbour has commercial libraries (SQLRDD, Visual xHarbour, a bit like Visual Basic's screen designer, for examples).

Visual Objects is more along the lines of "Visual Pascal", with the reserved words of xBase and such. Not all that different, but different enough to wean me off. I believe the entire product offering here is pay-only

There is a nice bunch at either Harbour or xHarbour, and rivalry between the two. Maybe you can take some of the modules you designed, and convert / extend them, for practice?

Or is your need to make money at this, day 1? For that, you will need to approach those that consume custom software. You will probably have to learn to interface with Oracle, or other SQL-based product.

David A. Smith

[o***@gmail.com]

Post by r***@alice.net
Hey all, I've recently retired and have a lot of recent Clipper (5.2) and xcode experience from maintaining the legacy systems at my former company. I'm wondering if there's still a need in the real world for us old guys, maybe doing emergency fixes, upgrades or short term project work, from home. Is this the place to keep up with that? Thanks in advance! - Rc.

There will always be some legacy software that must be maintained or ported to a new environment/language/dialect/framework/ etc.
Maybe even the applications you maintained. In that case: (the want to gain)knowledge of both the application and the new environment/language/etc is key.

Like David said: dive into a new language, and maybe even try at your former employer to get the source for test/experiments.

You've got the first, which is valuable as long as it is applicable, the latter is valuable for the future.

In my experience: just plain porting an application to .NET will give you not much benefit. The real benefit comes from using the right framework libraries and language constructs.
e.g. a ported ascan performs very bad in comparison to native .NET Lists etc.
So: use the old application as a knowledge base, and rewrite the whole thing or parts. 'easy' multithreading in Clipper/VO anyone?

If you want to take a look at XSharp.info, there is a growing community, also of retired Clipper programmers that dove into a new environment.

About places to keep up on news etc:
David mentioned some. I would add:

news.xsharp.info (about XSharp in all of the dialects it supports) No jobs.

https://www.linkedin.com/groups/159269 LinkedIn has some clipper groups and posted job opportunities (at the moment none)

news.govulcan.net (The newsgroups of GrafxSoft) are getting more and more silent. And no Clipper though.

xbase maybe? I have no experience there.


Regards, Otto

[Otto Christiaanse]

Post by r***@alice.net
Hey all, I've recently retired and have a lot of recent Clipper (5.2) and xcode experience from maintaining the legacy systems at my former company. I'm wondering if there's still a need in the real world for us old guys, maybe doing emergency fixes, upgrades or short term project work, from home. Is this the place to keep up with that? Thanks in advance! - Rc.

Hi Rob,
Please let us know what you do. Would very much like to know.

Regards,
Otto

[p***@gmail.com]

Post by r***@alice.net
Hey all, I've recently retired and have a lot of recent Clipper (5.2) and xcode experience from maintaining the legacy systems at my former company. I'm wondering if there's still a need in the real world for us old guys, maybe doing emergency fixes, upgrades or short term project work, from home. Is this the place to keep up with that? Thanks in advance! - Rc.