Hello Kim, thanks for sharing.
I had the same experience all of my FoxPro live.
For 19 years I have been in huge Automotive projects.
And before I was called a programmer, now I do Software Engineering.
And we have spent a lot of money for requirement tools, dev ops tools and more.
The world is turning , and the winner is the one, keeping share holder value alive and kicking…
Rainer
After 19 years of Automotive back to life.
Sorry, I didn’t realise the replied to post wasn’t linked. The page that needs fact checking is this one referenced above - Xojo: Why use the Xojo programming language ,( Xojo: Why use the Xojo programming language )
Hi Rainer
Visual FoxPro 9 was an excellent tool.
Tell me, what tools do you use now ???
I am a bit late to the party here 
here are my 2ct:
We consider Xojo also as technical debt internally. The reasons OP named might not count if you have one of them, but them combined shows some weaknesses the tool has.
A small team must mean not that they got no ability to execute. Xojo staff impressed us serveral times. But small teams have a bigger chance to loose important positions than large teams. We also experienced this here.
To be a nieche product and to have only a small usergroup must not be bad either, but Xojos ecosysten is far from beeing able to compete with others. I mean, there are tjird party supplies, and without them Xojo wouldn’t be half as versatile as it could be. But there’s no open source community, no real competition. Even if Xojo stays alive, if a plugin developer fades a way, the whole ecosystem has a problem.
The pricing is a thing as well.
And the closed IDE, which is nice if you’re a citizen developer. But many professionals want to have more. Starting with a git integration, ending by not beeing forced to click that mich around. I mean, we even wrote our own VS-Code Plugin to develop things faster than in the IDE itself.
What us brought to the point, that we have to get rid of most of the Xojo code we wrote in the past 6 years is, that you never know what happens next. Xojo is a completely blackbox. The tool is, the company as well. The priorities are changing every three months, you‘ll never know when your bug is beeing fixed or when a long introduced feature is eventually ready. I think this is what OP means, that Xojo is not Open Source. You are completely in the hands of them and you have no way to get further information or to influence. Look at the end of Web 1 from one day to another. I never experienced something like that elsewhere.
Last, and that is the most important thing. You don’t find new employees. No one with experience knows Xojo. And no one who cares about it‘s career accepts a job where he/she has to work in a language which they’ll never use again in their live if they’re leaving someday. Even if you teach new employees Xojo, it takes a year until they are at the level where you want to have them.
In this year they used other tools in their private life, liked them more and got frustrated when they are forced to use Xojo at work. This is our experience, it is no blaming, it is just how it is.
That is why I totally agree, that Xojo is technical debt.
Wow! I see.
Xojo has been around for over 25 years and we’ve seen many development tools come and go. An example many are familiar with is Pascal. When we started in 1998 Pascal was a super popular language; today nothing is made in Pascal.
Sad easily debunkable fallacy. The InnoSetup, that most people use to create install packages for Windows, for example, is written in Pascal.
Technical Debt is something your tool can have, not be.
Hi Jose, I tried a lot, but in business we use c/c++, and the world is turning to Microsoft, Java, and Python.
Rainer
.
true, you know what is meant.
I precise:
We consider it in our case as technical debt.
We are a growing company, we’re about to double the development team and Xojo is because of the reasons I told, not the right tool anymore (as well as for the OP).
This doesn’t meant, that all of you are in the same position. For Solo-Devs, citizen devs or small companies, it could fit perfectly.
For me the whole open-source thing is a non-issue, an illusion. I use some open-source tools, notably KiCad for PCB design and an Eclipse-based firmware IDE. Both are very usable and get the job done for me, but in neither case do I feel I have any more control over the features, bugs, or roadmaps of these tools than I have with Xojo - maybe even less. I’m certainly not going to go into the source code and start my own branch, even though there are some things in the Eclipse IDE that drive me bonkers - there are only so many hours in a day.
True.
In our case it is more the lack of a open source community than the tool it self.
If you compare OS projects in Xojo with the huge amount of them written Node, PHP, Python.
Also the package manager abilities, the laege ecosystem of implementable dev tools, which handle so much stuff for you.
That is the issue.
Last conference (2019 pre-covid) of one of the tools using pascal as languaje… If nothing is written on Pascal this days, maybe they where just hanging around looking for alternatives 
Maybe some newbies or students could believe that propaganda page but any developper with some experience can spot the lies and the whole page will make xojo look worse. And yes, it is really SAD that a company has to resort to demerit other tools with obvious lies instead of focusing on actual strenghts of the tool.
Any serious developer or analist, will not even waste time with the tool advertisement and just do what the OP described, read the forum, read other forums, ask for opinions…
Discover that many PRO users are leaving, feature promissed for YEARS, bugs standing for decades, platforms like web 1 deprecated without warning, a rewrite needed to use web 2, huge deprecations with api 2, outdated code and help in the blogs/forum/internet, etc, etc, etc.
ps: And now Xojo insists on using Var like pascal instead of dim 
Unfortunately some of the most significant contributors to Open Source Xojo code have moved on from Xojo… (And API 2 did not help that situation!)
It is hard to think of any long term open source Xojo projects that have been and still are actively developed/maintained by more than one person…
-Karen
You’re right, Julia.
Open source is a fallacy.
Many tools have become so FAT (It’s too patchy) that they have probably contained hidden bugs. The supposed control you can have over them is unfounded.
The fear of having a tool that could breach the security of a company’s network is real. Java is a good example of this.
JavaScript looks like a Frankenstein for me. It is like saying that everyone uses Excel, therefore they must use VB for developing applications in Excel.
Don’t get me wrong I’m 100% pro xojo
but name me one IDE(tool) today that is not derived from open source?
It’s true Rainer.
That is the reality of things. The world uses Microsoft, Java, and Python.
You only have two options, either you go with the people flow or you are against it.
I love Python. It is the tool that replaced the VFP9 that I used every day. This is a great language.
Java in the beginning was a good language. But never, the best option. Just comply. Computer risk experts are always on top of Java because they do not trust its architecture.
Microsoft tends to make complicated tools. Lately, it has been very popular with tools called POWER family, which promise low code. I use them and they are very good at what they do. I do complex things with Python embedded in them. By the way, Microsoft is a favorite for companies.
With this comment, I mean that XOJO is an excellent tool. Someone on this forum mentioned something like this: “as an engineer, you first see the problem, analyze, design, and then choose the correct tool” XOJO is not perfect, but it is an excellent option.
I have used open source Xojo (well REALBasic) Code. For years I used Asher Dunn’s Open source PDF classes before he went commercial (and eventually abandoned them). And i did make some minor modifications to them.
But because they were not updated and I needed more features, I eventually had to use a commercial Plugin-in, as Xojo took way too long to introduce PDF functionally (which still falls short of what i need).
The library that plugin is based on is Open source (I believe C) code that no longer is being actively developed, but as PDF is meant to be an archival format, and the plugin has the features I need, that is not really an issue.
I have needed to do scientific/statistical and graphing stuff as well for desktop apps.
Other languages have open source packages that could do all I needed and more … So much more that they that would have made tackling more ambitious projects more practical.
With Xojo I’ve had to buy plugins (even though I don’t make money with xojo) or write things from scratch as the open source Xojo code that what was available was not capable enough.
-Karen
While they say to use Var, as Dim is not depreciated that is not accurate. It’s a suggestion…
BTW back in mid-late 80’s I coded in Pascal and I totally forgot it used Var … all I remember from then is the damm semicolons! 
-Karen
I love seeing the opinions of so many people. Thanks for sharing your points of view.
For me, seeing so many opinions enriches knowledge.
I have had the fortune to work in one of the largest companies in the world, which is EY, a company of auditors and consultants.
In this off-topic never mention one point:
Not because they are excellent options. They choose it because a lot of people use the tool. There are people with a knowledge base in the market, and finally, the decision gives a low “risk”.
With the above, I do not mean the implementation of the standards in a company is an error. There is serious confusion between knowingly applying standards and applying a standard to everything.
For example, security standards in a cloud app are good principles, but making Excel a standard for data manipulation … is far from improving the company.
Hi Jose, the funny thing of my story…
I have unpacked my VFP box to write SW for build and releasmgmt.
And it’s working still today.
But… I have started my life with TI 99/4, and even had the 1st basic compiler on a pc…
Then I moved to XBase, but it’s hard to get jobs,…
I want to use apple in my private life and that’s why xojo…
Maybe it’s a luxary to be now in a position , to do what you feeling tells you, not political discussions.
BR Rainer
