Fatal fate
The Clipper, that product created by Nantucket and purchased by Computer Associates was discontinued in development around 1996. It was still marketed for a long time and until recently it was still possible to buy it by a third party who made a deal with CA.
The Clipper had its fatal fate when CA developed the CA-Visual Objects which was the most modern, object-oriented Clipper, a little lower-level and with a complete IDE. The product was poorly developed despite some very interesting ideas and was a complete failure. Part of the problem is that Clipper programmers failed to understand some differences from the new language that was similar to the old but not fully compatible (which also contributed to the failure).
There they had no interesting new product and the old one was abandoned. They didn’t believe that the old one could be improved and that there were still people interested in it. It helped the fact that the product was not very successful in important markets.
But the product was good, had interesting innovations and did some things that were only found in successful languages many years later.
Some language clones appeared that was already a clone of the language of the database simplified dBase.
Hope arises
The great success, if you can call it that, came with the Harbour, a version open source compatible with Clipper. Developed 1999.
In addition to giving developers complete freedom by not having a company but a community behind it, an automatic modernization was gained by abandoning a 16-bit C compiler created in the 1980s by any other modern 32-bit C compiler, and later 64-bit compiler. Running virtually on any platform that has a C compiler (some with a little effort). In a certain way Harbour codes are transformed into C codes generating executables always.
In addition language extensions have been created maintaining compatibility with legacy code and many new libraries have been slowly developed, such as GUI (Qt is just example), sockets, compression, new data structures and algorithms, encryption, images, Unicode, XML, clients for various relational databases or other technologies, better access to the operating system, better ways to access your own database system (dbf
), multi-threaded and much more.
The language came to have extensions that allow object orientation very similar to that adopted by other dynamic typing languages, gained pointers (which are actually references), structures of hash (who are actually not hashes in fact, yeah, Harbour’s people are bad at naming), for each, switch, better literals, dynamic code loading, compiled or not, and constructs that avoid using some legacy features considered bad and easier integration with C code.
Some improvements have also been added to the pre-processor which is absurdly better than the existing one for the C (not having a pre-processor which is bad in C, it’s having a bad one).
In addition the compiler improved some checks and the entire infrastructure, in addition to the compilation, was modernized.
Completion
It is not to say that we will see new programmers using a language that owes almost nothing to the most modern languages but who has legacy code or is well adapted to the technology can still continue evolving their software using something that would surprise programmers of PHP, Python, Ruby, Javascript, etc.
I just don’t understand why there are still programmers who continue to use the original Clipper, sometimes an old version of the 80’s.
So although there are people who still use it, you can no longer use it directly (16 bits!!! ). What you can do is to use the modernized version. There’s a better way to use the same technology. Not only the Harbour, there are other alternatives to the Clipper (I don’t know them well) such as xHarbour (a Fork Harbour), xBasse++, Flagship, Foxpro (abandoned by Microsoft), Advpl (proprietary language used in Totvs' Protheus ERP).
I would like to see programmers who use these technologies here.
– Maniero
Just for the record, when I opened Sopt, I invited the people on Harbour’s list, in a message directed to those who communicate in Portuguese, to participate. Who knows moving the subject they appear here ;) and +1 by touching the subject. I’m surprised as there are Brazilian compiling thing in Clipper yet.
– Bacco
Will the Ramalho(the one from the books) appear to answer? whenever someone speaks of Clipper is quoted his books.
– rray
I would never talk about those bad books. I really learned to program, I didn’t have my brain shredded by those books :D
– Maniero
I never saw it, I heard it had some professors who worked with Clipper, and speak well of the book dude. haha
– rray
I personally would like to see topics like this talking about other great languages of the past, such as Pascal, Fortran and Cobol[The latter two are still widely used, but for younger programmers they are not very well regarded]
– MarceloBoni
Sometimes I think I was born in the Paleozoic period, because besides the Clipper I worked with Turbo Pascal, PL1 (with SQL), Pick and Zim. And interesting is that inside I still see system running in Clipper.
– Jothaz
This place is gonna be a dinosaur hangout :)
– Maniero
@It lost about five years ago I was asked to help in the migration of a registry office system I did in Clipper. It was working perfectly and serving more or less well, even so many years later (I couldn’t imagine they still used it). Ramalho has practically been my pair-Programmer through his books and pocket guide. Maybe I’ll look for him to thank you (since we touched on the subject).
– Caffé
I had a teacher in college that the same still uses Clipper today, he says he does in Clipper what many programmer does not do in Java, C++, I know he makes good money still, he has a lot of software rented.
– João Neto
@Joãoneto if he still uses the Clipper himself and not the Harbour, tell him to come here and update himself a little without losing all the investment he made in technology.
– Maniero
@mustache I’ll tell him!
– João Neto
@Even Joãoneto will be able to take advantage of much of the code (or who knows all the code) without modifications, and recompile in 32 or 64 bits, and for a number of different platforms if you want. And what has to be modified, is minimal to take advantage of new features of the platform’s own evolution.
– Bacco
Hello, I program in Clipper until today, I have to give maintenance on a monstrous system, +- 45 networked terminals.... works perfectly !
– user33515
Some banks still use the same, in Porto Alegre there are some vacancies open.
– Wagner Rodrigues
I used Clipper for a long time, an easy and very cool language for the DOS era. I still have programs done in Clipper, it was a memorable time.
– Orlando Tosta