Long live Clipper -- one of my first paid gigs. Amazing platform to write (compiled!) console-based applications with a DB living locally or on a networked drive. Something which does not exist anymore as a market.
Same here, good memories, compiling took up to 30 minutes, so during compiling we always went for a game of billiards. Coming back you found out that the compilation had crashed after 5 minutes, fix bug and start the same routine.
I don’t recall compilation being slow. The Clipper app for small businesses that my father created used overlays because it couldn’t fit in memory, yet compilation was still fast (all of this was happening on an XT). Linking, on the other hand, was painfully slow, but one could use Turbo Linker if overlays weren’t needed—TL was unbelievably fast. Later, Blinker came along. It was slower than TL but offered excellent support for overlays (and a bunch of other useful features) while still being much faster than MS Linker.
Same here. I really enjoyed working with Clipper. The fun ran out when my application was bursting through the available memory though. It would be nice to have a 64 bit linux/macos/windows Clipper-like compiler.
They are much faster to operate and more efficient for CRUD type apps then GUI based ones.