And have a BCP (Business Continuity Planning) to allow Xojo keep going beyond such kind of events. 
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The whole idea is a bit of a silly joke, the kind of click bait you get in trash media.
The reality is that VS for Mac is/was a minor tool of no consequence in either the corporate of public software markets and further more what market there is can be covered by VS code and Jetbrains Rider. And to go from that to questioning the wisdom of using a widely used and supported language to build mission critical applications is just nonsense.
As someone who was involved in such decisions for to well known US corporations I can say it was never about the language nor the vendor. The main issues were how easy was it to find software engineers with the skills and the ease of integration with other software tools and libraries being used in the environment.
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I plan to and appear to have the genes for it as far as I can tell. 
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No need to worry there. Thatās all been taken care of. If I stepped off the curb tomorrow without looking, Xojo would continue on.
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Geoff - I prefer the āif I won a Billion Dollar lottery prize and emigrated to Tahitiā version of moving on. (whether itās me or you!)
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TRUE !!!
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As someone who is in the process of migrating to a new development tool / ecosystem, I can say that moving to a product which has massive amounts of current documentation, examples, with a really vibrant and varied customer base has been really eye opening. Iāve even learned a lot from people who used to participate here.
The fact that it is from a larger company which is still supporting their older language after the ānewerā one was announced almost 10 years ago, gives me confidence that the rug wonāt suddenly be pulled out from under my feet again.
Iām really happy that the new tool allows me to use the included system functionality that Iāve been asking for (some for over a decade).
Another advantage, is that there are far more jobs available which use the tool / language Iām learning, so if I quit my company, it will be a lot easier to find contract work or employment.
So my answer to this question is āYes, I do feel it is safer buying into a development tool / ecosystem from a Big Name.ā
Which is a shame.
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In small companies like mine, you use the tools to get the job done with the minimum number of programmers.
In my case, it has been RealBasic/RealStudio/Xojo for the native Windows and macOS applications that are so close to the versions that could be developed with specialized tools (Windows-specific or Xcode) that my (business) users donāt seem to care. Performance for those apps is also great. The console app developed with Xojo also runs wonderfully.
Since then, Iāve added other applications to the stack, developed with other tools, but always thinking about whether theyāre open enough to survive or being easy enough to read for converting to another platform.
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From a technology standpoint, itās not based on the name, itās based on the tool.
From a business standpoint, unless youāre doing something extremely cutting edge, the suits will often demand you use the larger name.
That said, I used Xojo to build internal tools when I worked at Apple. But I didnāt ask permission, I just did it. Had I asked first, Iām sure I would have been told to only use Apple tools.
Xojo allowed me to build truly useful software that our whole team ended up using, and in a much shorter timeframe than if I had to do it in Objective C or .Net/Mono/etc.
That said, after I left, there was no one else that understood Xojo to maintain the tools, so perhaps my choice ended up biting them in the long run.
In any case, if youāre a small team or an independent developer, use the best tool for the job rather than choosing it based on the name. Sometimes those options will overlap, sometimes they will not.
Personally I use Xojo today because I just like it. I enjoy the language, overcoming the occasional quirks, and find its ease of cross-platform development quite refreshing from some of the more platform-specific options.
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Given their cavalier approach to changing the OS, perhaps they bit themselves.
Two former clients of mine have moved off of Xojo because of this. The couldnāt find anyone with Xojo experience so they had to train them. About the time the developers became proficient they left for other jobs (in a more mainstream language). For a small to medium sized business they canāt afford to spend 2 years getting a programmer up to speed just to lose them later.
The lack of Xojo developers (and consultants) isnāt great and, frankly, Xojo is not enticing for job seekers. You can use this niche language (albeit fairly cool at times) that has a single (if any) job posting in your area, or you can use this widely used language that you can find multiple jobs in your area fairly easily.
As someone who was recently retrained in a new language (after 20+ years of Xojo consulting) I find it refreshing to see the number of opportunities I have if I decide to move on from my current employer. Has it been an easy or smooth transition? Nope. But Iām almost a year into it and going back to Xojo (currently on a 3 month Xojo maintenance project) has not been pleasant for a variety of reasons.
Iād love for Xojo to get better. Iām rooting for them. But at the same time the IDE, the language features (or lack thereof) and the probability that theyāll actually add anything of importance (for me anyway) is slim to none - for those theyād need a really good compiler developer and the will to add said features. Past performance is indicative of future events so caveat emptor.
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This thread seems to hint that moving from one language to another is a big deal. During my career I have learnt and then used the languages that I needed to. Some 20 years ago, the person who had just started working on the companyās network assets database, quit. So I was given the task, and the departing person managed to give me a 30-minute tutorial on PHP and javascript. At that point Iād heard of neither of these, as Iād moved into Operations some years before after a lifetime of programmng, and so got a bit out of touch. IME, you learn what you need to learn, and locate the resources to do so.
The app Iāve been writing recently, I wanted to run on Mac/Win/Lin, and after a bit of looking settled on Xojo as pretty much the only choice. So I learn it.
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I canāt speak for anyone else but I was deep in the Xojo ecosystem and consulting business. If your existing business relies on a particular language itās not always easy to just āmove onā to another language. As a consultant youāre expected to be an expert so you have to learn the new language on your own dime and time.
Dunno about anyone else but putting in a full day and then expecting to learn and become proficient in a new language/framework/IDE is not always easy. I spent much of the first couple of months in retraining thinking about how easy would be to do in Xojo. And then the switch flipped in my mind and I started thinking about how I wish Xojo did like the new language.
But you are right. If youāve learned Xojo you can learn another language. But I do think itās a big deal but I think it largely depends on what youāre doing and how fast you need to do it. Internal app vs commercial app. An app for you or an app for others. etc. etc. We all learn different and at different speeds.
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Maybe the languaje itself is not hard. But you are Not thinking in all the other things that the change implies. Just look at the other thread about moving apps from web1 to web2 LOTS of users not changing, even in the āSameā languaje, but you need a lot of time (and money) to rewrite your apps, internal frameworks, time and money to retrain your user with the unavoidable changes in the UI, functionality, etc. etc.
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Itās not so much the language but the framework ecosystem wit available components and plugins etcā¦
That is a bigger factor now than years ago I think.
-Karen
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For the most part, once you know how to think like a developer, language becomes less and less relevant. If you can sketch out the logic in pseudocode, then it becomes a matter of knowing (or having a good reference for) the syntax and keywords for whatever language youāre writing in.
This isnāt always true though, such as when moving to an object oriented language from a procedural one, or other huge paradigm jumps (I think back to the massive shift in thinking it took for me to get into x86 assembly after doing nothing but quickbasic my whole life), but Iād like to think all of us are capable of learning any language we set our minds to once we have mastered at least one other.
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In principle you are right, but the reality is quite different. Because you bind yourself to a syntax and above all to a development tool. So switching from VB.NET to Xojo was pretty painless. Studying Java at university already more annoying. But from that to C# the transition is already simple (although with the latter Iām talking about development IDEs, such as Visual Studio).
But programming in C++ is absolutely another world personally, a big trauma
Python? I had to do a little thing with it and no, Iām not at all.
So in conclusion, I share your principle, but the reality is often another, obviously based on oneās abilities, which are not all the same
All of you forgot a point in this discussion:
the age of the programmer.
At 20, (s)he do not really care about all of what you wrote (except main stream development environment (?))ā¦ but when you are near 60, you will have more difficulties to move from something to something else. In fact, small changes are OK, but massive onesā¦
you are starting yourself what to do.
Learning all these changes = learning a different programming environment.
What is worth my time ?
And, sometimes, stopping right now is also an answer.
Things are not easy as it seems until you walk that street.
Before REALbasic, I was usingā¦ so many different things (Frontier, AppleScript, Think C, some Pascal, ā¦/ā¦ AppleSoft BASIC).
And going from one to another was easy.
But when You are spending more time with the LR than coding, you start asking questions to Self (of Me).
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what is āLRā?
The docs. Language Reference.
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