Does Clipper still exist?

Question

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?

Answer 1

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).

Answer 2

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.