Hacker News Reader

Comment by gonzus | Hacker News Reader

Long live Clipper -- one of my first paid gigs. Amazing platform to write (compiled!) console-based applications with a DB living locally or on a networked drive. Something which does not exist anymore as a market.

View on HN

XBase / Foxpro / Clipper apps are probably still used in India, widely, in small department stores, grocery stores, factories, medical stores, etc.

They are much faster to operate and more efficient for CRUD type apps then GUI based ones.

Same in Brazil. And users love them.

Take a look to what are using on Leroy & Merlin stores

Had not heard of them, had to google it:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leroy_Merlin

Same here, good memories, compiling took up to 30 minutes, so during compiling we always went for a game of billiards. Coming back you found out that the compilation had crashed after 5 minutes, fix bug and start the same routine.

I don’t recall compilation being slow. The Clipper app for small businesses that my father created used overlays because it couldn’t fit in memory, yet compilation was still fast (all of this was happening on an XT). Linking, on the other hand, was painfully slow, but one could use Turbo Linker if overlays weren’t needed—TL was unbelievably fast. Later, Blinker came along. It was slower than TL but offered excellent support for overlays (and a bunch of other useful features) while still being much faster than MS Linker.

Overlays were supported even in Turbo Pascal 3.x, which, IIRC, came out in the same decade as Clipper, maybe before or around the same time.

I used Clipper Summer '87, and Clipper 5.x on a 386SX, running at 20MHz, 2 MB, and a 40 MB HDD.

What were you doing for 30 minutes?!?

You sure it wasn’t a DX? The SX only came out in ‘88.

Either way, that would be a hell of a high end system for that time.

I think you just showed lack of knowledge on Clipper product names.

Before 5, they had season names, I didn't mention to be using Clipper Summer '87 in 1987, rather having used it.

Sorry, I misunderstood then!

Same here. I really enjoyed working with Clipper. The fun ran out when my application was bursting through the available memory though. It would be nice to have a 64 bit linux/macos/windows Clipper-like compiler.

Well that exists Harbour https://harbour.github.io

Yeah, I know about it. However every time I've tried to use it I ran into all kinds of problems.

Also, there were a ton of very powerful third-party libraries too!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com