For the last few years you have dabbled with the idea of retiring to which I have always replied: "That ain't gonna' happen".
Your contributions to our community have been immense.
So much of what we can do in the market is because of your guidance, ideas and hard work.
You give us the tools we need to make programming easier and you're always active in the community and forum.
So here we are several years after you first talked about retirement and you're still going strong.
Thank goodness you haven't come to your senses!
Yes, it is true that I talked about this to Bobby many times over the past few years but that was mostly because programming and consulting was becoming a very mundane task for me. Alaska started talking about Xbase++ 2.0 way back in 2008 but were giving us nothing. Then they shifted their focus to the VFP community which just wasn't coming on board. Steffen asked me to join him in Phoenix back in 2009 to help him introduce Xbase++ to the VFP community. I'll never forget that first meeting with the VFP leadership. It was obvious to me then that we were trying to mix oil and water, or for a better metaphor, Donald Trump and Republicans. I learned that if you try long enough to mix oil and water, they will eventually mix but you have to keep shaking and the end result is still a mixture that takes terrible. That was also the year that, after leaving that first meeting, I had a motorcyle accident on the way home. Was this a premonition of things to come? I thought so, and so I just wanted out.
Now it is 5 years later, and I have been to no less that 5 SWXbase++ conferences. Steffen always loved the Star Trek TV series and he had memorabilia in his office. He was blown away when I showed him that I owned the very ears that Patrick Stewart wore in the "Romulun Unification" episodes. I think he came to view himself as the Borg and that through sheer tyranny of will he could assimilate the VFP community. I supported him in his efforts and even used to tell VFP programmers that resistance was futile. What we didn't realize, at the time, was that we are the ones being assimilated by the Microsoft Borg. I recognized this a few years ago, and so I started to resist, whereas Steffen continued to be assimilated.
Bobby supported me in my resistance movement which we started at the 2015 U.S.A. conference and also exported to the European conference a month later. I saw some progress and was given a consulting project in which I was responsible for converting a VFP application to Xbase++ using only eXpress++ and none of the unfinished tools that are being developed by Alaska specifically for VFP migration. The project turned out to be so successful that the VFP developers and I are giving a session this year showing how this was done. BTW - there is absolutely nothing in the code that requires Xbase++ 2.0. It will all compile and run under 1.9.
This success story has inspired me to want to continue my programming and consulting career and to devote myself to promoting eXpress++ in a whole new way. And so, in 2015, I introduced the idea of SGL (structured GUI language) to the VFP community and also to the Xbase++ community to better explain that eXpress++ is not just a library but is a descriptive language for GUI development in the same way the SQL is a descriptive language for database queries.
And so, to make a long story short, I am not planning to retire any time soon.
The eXpress train is coming - and it has more cars.
Bobby said it best...
You are truly a shining light...
(for a curmudgeon anyway)
Brian Wolfsohn
Retired and traveling around the country to music festivals in my RV.
OOPS.. Corona Virus, so NOT traveling right now... http://www.breadmanrises.com
FB travel group: The Breadman Rises
