Does Clipper still exist?

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Clipper was a widely used language in the 80’s and even most of the 90’s. Especially in some countries like Brazil. In fact many administrative systems still used today were made in it. But it is still possible to develop modern software using it?

  • 2

    I would like to see programmers who use these technologies here.

  • 2

    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.

  • Will the Ramalho(the one from the books) appear to answer? whenever someone speaks of Clipper is quoted his books.

  • 1

    I would never talk about those bad books. I really learned to program, I didn’t have my brain shredded by those books :D

  • I never saw it, I heard it had some professors who worked with Clipper, and speak well of the book dude. haha

  • 3

    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]

  • 3

    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.

  • 2

    This place is gonna be a dinosaur hangout :)

  • 1

    @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).

  • 1

    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.

  • 1

    @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.

  • @mustache I’ll tell him!

  • @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.

  • Hello, I program in Clipper until today, I have to give maintenance on a monstrous system, +- 45 networked terminals.... works perfectly !

  • Some banks still use the same, in Porto Alegre there are some vacancies open.

  • 1

    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.

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2 answers

26


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).

  • 1

    Maybe a Clipper.NET? ;)

  • 1

    Existed and died: https://groups.google.com/forum/#! topic/comp.lang.Clipper.visual-Objects/Jomjotsk61e It didn’t make sense to exist, as it doesn’t make a lot of language they ported into the .Net. And with that name I could only give that :)

  • I had no idea. Tadinho. =/

  • @Onosendai There is still Vulcan.Net also seems that will be abandoned and the new X# (will give roll with that name, already shows the amateurism of the guys). Again it makes no sense to not be picking up a market rest of unwary.

  • thank you so much for so many constructive and formative comments. I have developed thousands of lines of programming with the good old Clipper. I left for several other jobs, because I did not adapt to the visual model of windows and was unaware of Harbour and this Phyton. I made dynamic tables, cross-referencing dozens of databases, software for bookstores, shoe store, office, stock, doctors, DMV, labs, pig farming, gas stations, stockroom, financial, etc. Thanks for the tips and I’ll check out the Harbour, Phyton and Flagship for Linux. Thanks.

  • I don’t understand how to this day there are people still attached to these technologies, and even worse, owners where most devs use without a license, yes most tools of the Xbase standard are proprietary. Use pirate tool after 100x more powerful and free solutions exist. There are several that in my view would be very quiet for this audience. Python, Ruby, Julia, Node.js, etc. OOP is a problem? All the ones I mentioned are multparadigmas. In python you can create an entire application without creating any class and even counting on Qt5 (Pyside2)

  • @Matheussaraiva and I do not understand how some groundless on the subject resolve to expose it publicly. 100% of what is said there is false information, until the part that is not about xbase. Harbour is 100% open, has nothing pirate, faster, simpler, more elegant, allows everything that Python and other languages allow, including Qt5. It’s not 100X more powerful, but I don’t know any language that’s 2 or 3X more powerful than any other, so this statement alone is even naive.

  • Depending on the Harbour criterion is more powerful than all of the above, of course not in some criteria. And I know almost all of them, only Julia that I know superficially, but have far less fans than xbase. But of course, everyone can like and use whatever they want. And you can even talk about what you don’t know. Alias, the comment is full of ranso.

  • @Maniero, beware of judgements about people without knowing them, I worked with Clipper Summer 87 for several years, Clipper was my first language, so I do have some property to say something. The comparison I made was with Clipper, not with Harbour, although I still see Harbour far behind the ones I mentioned, is almost unfeasible for things like IA, Data Science, CV, etc. Web, although it is even possible no one in sound conscience risks. Already some I mentioned are ideal for this and a little more.

  • @Maniero, About being free or not, I have referred in a more generic way, tools cited as Vulcan.net, VO, Xbase++, etc., are proprietary, even the 16bit Clipper itself remains proprietary, and limited as it boils down to desktop development. But I don’t want and I won’t turn it into a debate, so feel free to make whatever judgment you want. Happy 2019.

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7

In the 90s I did some applications in Dbaseiii-Plus, Dbase IV and Clipper, preferring Clipper to Dbase(s). But with the appearance of Microsoft Windows and Clipper running only in DOS environment, I opted for Foxpro, but did not like and abandoned the Clipper.

Meanwhile three years ago I discovered Harbour and I liked the way it is structured and its potentials, including the portability of applications to *NIX environments (BSD, Mac, Linux, etc.) in addition to traditional Microsoft operating systems, links to relational databases beyond traditional DBF files, creation and use of GUI’s, etc..

After I started developing a management application for an association, I soon chose to switch from Harbour to Python for several reasons:

  1. Harbour development was taking longer than in Python;
  2. I started to notice that it would be harder to keep the code in Harbour than in Python;
  3. Although Harbour was already stable, there were still some uncertainties as to where Harbour would go;
  4. The Python community is larger and offers more support possibilities than the Harbour community.

To this day I don’t regret the choice I made.

Note that Harbour is "open source" while xHarbour is proprietary.

  • 2

    I always find it interesting to have one more answer to the subject. I would just like to point out that 1 and 2 are merely the author’s personal experience of language, and do not reflect a Harbour problem in itself (in my case, for example, making a full application in Harbour takes a fraction of the time as in Py, and so we could talk about a thousand other languages). Furthermore, a welcome to the Stack Overflow in Portuguese at @Lahan, and with the exception mentioned, received my positive vote for the rest.

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    @Bacco Grateful for the welcome and the positive vote. As for the quality of the answer, the truth is that the question: "But is it still possible to develop modern software using it?" can originate two types of response, which are "yes" and "no". Any answer to this question will always be from the point of view of one’s personal experience, because no specific technical question is asked about the Clipper. I confess that I still hesitated to answer, but felt that eventually the answer could be useful.

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