[JSR_FDED]

This is awesome. Loved the training video as well.

It’s kind of cool to see people putting in the effort to learn 30 commands and becoming masters of their own destiny. I guess it’s the same sense of mastery that Excel users have today.

What’s the dBase II/III equivalent today?

[ChristopherDrum]

Thank you, I'm glad you liked the article.

Hopefully someone more learned than myself about modern database programming will chime in. I'm not sure what current system offers both the database and development features in such a seamless package. That said, on the Mastodon post for this article, I was told, "Learning dBASE isn't for naught" and was directed to https://xharbour.org/ as a modern dBASE/Clipper implementation. (haven't had a chance to try it yet, personally)

[twoodfin]

Random trivia: Host of the video Gentry Lee is an accomplished space engineer, but he’s also 50% responsible for the collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke that produced the awful Rendezvous with Rama sequels.

[benley]

> awful Rendezvous with Rama sequels.

Were those so awful? I remember rather enjoying them when I read them many years ago - though the last book got pretty weird, as 4th-book-in-trilogy installments tend to do.

[mayama]

> What’s the dBase II/III equivalent today?

Salesforce, firebase or Supabase etc., but, all are SAAS platforms. Not sure if there is any other platform where you can do database and applications that you can host yourself.

[mercurialuser]

Have a look at harbour project on github. It compiles Clipper code to be run on several different platforms, in text and gui mode (also with Qt bindings) and mow there are several frameworks for web development

[buescher]

Probably SharePoint lists, even though they’re even less relational. That’s probably a good constraint on most users ironically.

[pjmlp]

Access, FileMaker are still around, or if you going SaaS, something like Airtable, I guess.

[ChristopherDrum]

Ah, of course, FileMaker. How could I forget the system that got me started on the development career path?!

[shrubble]

SQLite; or MySQL with PHP or any other simple programming framework.