I’m always quite verbose (which makes for lots of typing), but I always remember working alongside a developer who couldn’t be bothered with long variable names and shortened everything to four characters long! Great until he needed to re-visit the code months later and didnt have a clue what variables were for what!

Of course de-compiling interpreted languages is pretty straight-forward and I remember from the dim and distant past using refox as per the other posters reference to foxpro and using it that to decompile a foxpro app.

Gary

http://silverlight.net/blogs/jesseliberty/archive/2008/03/24/back-up-your-code.aspx

Great stuff.

I once read a similiar article about a system administrator writing a column about programming (don’t ask).

He stated he was asked by a client to rewrite an internal application to support windows because it was a DOS-based application.

The sys admin said he remembered how easy it used to be in Visual FoxPro 9 and tried it.

He did however have to track a local copy of FoxPro 9 of his local ebay, because no store around would sell it. (You’d think that he would rethink his tool set by then)

So he rewrote it, and got it working, and was wondering why oh why Microsoft stopped supporting FoxPro.

His conclusion?

It was working TOO good, so thats why Microsoft pulled the plug.