Delphi vs. Enthought Canopy vs. Visual FoxPro (Discontinued)

Building desktop applications for Windows is the best, despite unknown, solution. But for creating web applications or native apps for mobile, I think there are better solutions. Embarcadero releases are aligned with Windows versions, so for developing Windows desktop apps, with the touch and feel of the operation system is as good as can be Microsoft tools.

Enthought Canopy is best suites for scripting data analytical concepts. It has a wide range of data analytical libraries and also is good for data visualization. I would not recommend using Enthought Canopy only as an IDE, there may be better options available. If you're looking for a good data simulation & visualization package, Canopy it is.

Incentivized

Legacy applications already on VFP are a good candidate. If you plan to move to iOS and Android apps, VFP is not for you. Also, in future access to VFP programmers may be limited. You could use VFP as a powerful database tool. I know of many programmers who love to exploit the features of VFP to create easy to use applications.

• Providing scientific libraries, both open source and Enthought's own libraries which are excellent.
• Training. They provide several courses in python for general use and for data analysis.
• Debugging tools. Several IDEs provides tools for debugging, but I think they are insufficient or too general. Canopy has a special debugging tool, specially design for python.

• Treat data from files
• Reporting

Incentivized

• Canopy does not support Python 3
• There were times the Python shell crashed, and I would have to restart it
• Some Python libraries are slow.

Incentivized

• Microsoft stopped selling this and stopped supporting it in 2014. It still works on Windows 10, but if you have a problem, you are on your own.
• The look and feel of screens and displayed text is getting a little dated.
• It's really designed for desktop/server environments rather than the cloud.

Incentivized

There are several easy to use and powerful features of VFP that programmers like.

Although MS has discontinued support of VFP there is a good community of programmers that are available for help. In fact we have several programmers at Apptread that are skilled not only in VFP but also .NET so that if there is a need to migrate some parts of applications to .NET , it is easy for us to do that.

Before Canopy with its python we were working with Matlab. We decided for Canopy against Matlab for two reasons: First, we believe that python together with NumPy or SciPy can achieve the objectives with less code and therefore less training, and second the prizes are much lower than matlab which is most robust, expensive and less intuitive. It's clear we are making the comparison with python and it has nothing to with canopy. But with Canopy you feel you have all those tools close together without the problem of configuration, besides a lot of personalized libraries that complements a typical python environment.

We are only using FoxPro because it is the only way to add custom plugins into the software we use to manage our stock. FoxPro is a semi-oriented object language and should clearly not be compared with recent technologies.

Incentivized

• Its easier to define KPI's with Enthought
• It is good for reiteration and building on top of existing scripts
• Its dedicated Python console makes it easier to execute projects.

Incentivized

• Positive impact is that the value of FoxPro applications has continued to increase over the years, so we are in high demand for our services.
• Negative impact is that sometimes you have difficult to support scenarios where you might have to spend many hours to just keep something functional.
• A negative impact is that this language is taught in very few places, either in schools, or private learning centers.

Incentivized