>dBase-derived languages in general were a lot of fun. And incredibly productive, basically taylor-made for cranking out CRUD apps.
Yes, true. I did a good amount of XBASE (which is the generic term for dBASE, Foxpro, Clipper, etc., and I worked on all 3 of those) in my early programming days (along with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C) - including a very interesting line-of-business app for a switchgear manufacturer's factory - that one was in Visual Foxpro and using a Novell Netware LAN and Windows. Was on site there for around 10 months for the project. Turned out to be ~180 KLOC in size and had a lot of features, from CRUD to parameterized SQL reports of all sorts to somewhat advanced (for the time at least) decision-support sort of stuff, plus production planning.
>I do ponder sometimes why we don't have something quite like that these days.
There actually are a few options (maybe you are aware of them). Harbour project, Flagship (both names are probably plays on Clipper), and a few others. There are also both paid and free libraries that can read and write XBASE formats. My own xtopdf toolkit includes DBFReader, a class that can read dBASE files, both the metadata and data.
I know that Harbour is a re-implementation of Clipper with some added features, but not much else.
I think it's less about the DBF file format and xBase syntax, and more about the high-level conceptual approach, with the language built around concepts like database cursors and mapping data (rather than relegating it all to a library). If this stuff is to be redesigned from scratch in a modern environment, it would have to deal with contemporary data sources - meaning SQL RDBMS - and the syntax could definitely be more consistent and less crufty.
I think you're right on that. Having the database-related features built-in to the language makes a difference. A bit like how REBOL has many data types built-in (~45, IIRC [1]). And if not now, I guess over time, Red will have them too.
Yes, true. I did a good amount of XBASE (which is the generic term for dBASE, Foxpro, Clipper, etc., and I worked on all 3 of those) in my early programming days (along with Turbo Pascal and Turbo C) - including a very interesting line-of-business app for a switchgear manufacturer's factory - that one was in Visual Foxpro and using a Novell Netware LAN and Windows. Was on site there for around 10 months for the project. Turned out to be ~180 KLOC in size and had a lot of features, from CRUD to parameterized SQL reports of all sorts to somewhat advanced (for the time at least) decision-support sort of stuff, plus production planning.
>I do ponder sometimes why we don't have something quite like that these days.
There actually are a few options (maybe you are aware of them). Harbour project, Flagship (both names are probably plays on Clipper), and a few others. There are also both paid and free libraries that can read and write XBASE formats. My own xtopdf toolkit includes DBFReader, a class that can read dBASE files, both the metadata and data.
http://slides.com/vasudevram/xtopdf
https://bitbucket.org/vasudevram/xtopdf