Editing Clipper (programming language) (section)

==Market penetration==
Nantucket sold well in Western markets. Also, in November 1991, the ''New York Times'' reported the company's success in "painstakingly convincing Soviet software developers that buying is preferable to pirating". According to the article, Clipper had sold 2,000 copies in the Soviet Union<ref name=Bar>{{cite news |last1=Rifkin |first1=Glenn |date=3 November 1991 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/03/business/selling-software-soviet-style.html |title=Selling Software, Soviet-Style |work=[[The New York Times]]}}</ref> (compared to 250,000 worldwide).

===Decline===
In the early 1990s, under new ownership,<ref name=DobCA95/> Clipper failed to transition from [[DOS]] to [[Microsoft Windows|Windows]]. As a result, almost no new commercial applications were written in Clipper after 1995.

By then, the "classically trained programmer" commonly used [[Strong and weak typing|strong typing]], in contrast to the original dBASE language. An evolution of Clipper, named VO, added strong typing but made it optional, to remain compatible with existing code.<ref name=DobCA95/> Four of the more important languages that took over from Clipper were [[Visual Basic]], [[Microsoft Access]], [[Delphi (software)|Delphi]], and [[Powerbuilder]]. All provided strong typing.

===Revival by third-parties===
The Clipper language is being actively implemented and extended by multiple organizations/vendors, like ''[[XBase++]]'' from Alaska Software and ''FlagShip'', and [[free software|free]] ([[GNU General Public License|GPL]]-licensed) projects like ''[[Harbour (software)|Harbour]]'' and ''xHarbour''.<ref>{{cite web |author1=fbizzell |date=January 31, 2006 |url=https://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1184854 |title=Converting Clipper applications to windows}}</ref>

Many of the current implementations are portable ([[DOS]], [[Windows]], [[Linux]] ([[32-bit computing|32-]] and [[64-bit computing|64-bit]]), [[Unix]] (32- and 64-bit), and [[macOS]]), supporting many language extensions,<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.xharbour.org/index.asp?page=product/extensions |title=xHarbour.org |website=www.xharbour.org}}</ref> with much extended [[runtime library|runtime libraries]], and various Replaceable Database Drivers (RDD) supporting many popular database formats, like [[dBase|DBF]], DBTNTX, DBFCDX ([[Visual FoxPro|FoxPro]], Apollo, Comix, and Advantage Database Server), MachSix (SIx Driver and Apollo), [[SQL]], and more. These newer implementations all strive for full compatibility with the standard [[dBase]]/[[xBase]] syntax, while also offering OOP approaches and target-based syntax such as <code>SQLExecute()</code>.

===Usenet===
The Clipper [[Usenet]] [[newsgroup]]s are [https://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.clipper comp.lang.clipper] and [https://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.clipper.visual-objects comp.lang.clipper.visual-objects].

[[File:Clipper Helloworld.png|thumb|400px|Compiling and running hello world program in clipper]]