FoxPro 2.x was fast and easy to use, this made it enormously popular back in the days. In mid to late 90' it was the first choice for most apps, even in small to medium companies. The success was coming from performance and ease of use.
In the 90' Turbo Pascal and FoxPro were languages that anyone could understand and use quickly without a lot of training. It made it accessible for learners with or without CS background, so I had many colleagues that knew and wrote a bit of FoxPro 2.6 for their needs - from small task automation to entire apps covering what the company IT was not able to do because it was not a priority.
Fast forward 30 years, the situation is not better, even if one would expect progress. We have hundreds of languages, the language landscape is way too fragmented. Do you want to write some code? Jim will do X, Joe will do Y and Jane will do Z and they will use different languages and everything will not be compatible and they will not understand each other's code. For data we have SQL and we have ANSI SQL which makes it partially compatible, that is great, but for general coding... no. And if you want to write a small data app you cannot just fire up FoxPro, you need to install a SQL server of sort, configure it (and that can be a small dark art in cases), get something like VS Code and write in a language that will not be SQL, but will interact also with SQL. Too complex, too complicated, too easy to give up. And if you want to explain to a non-IT person OOP and why a single line of WriteLine('Hello World') needs a class and a method and what is OO using the old story 'imagine you have animals, and some animals are mammals and mammals can inherit properties from the animals class' just to write Hello World on the screen, then we have a problem of accessibility: 'Man, I just want to write 2 words on that bloody screen!'.
So this is why FoxPro was easy to use: just fire it up and write some code, there is not much to prepare and nothing much you can break. And no dependency management, no unsafe downloads from all over the Internet, you can learn everything in a week and forget it in a year.
In the 90' Turbo Pascal and FoxPro were languages that anyone could understand and use quickly without a lot of training. It made it accessible for learners with or without CS background, so I had many colleagues that knew and wrote a bit of FoxPro 2.6 for their needs - from small task automation to entire apps covering what the company IT was not able to do because it was not a priority.
Fast forward 30 years, the situation is not better, even if one would expect progress. We have hundreds of languages, the language landscape is way too fragmented. Do you want to write some code? Jim will do X, Joe will do Y and Jane will do Z and they will use different languages and everything will not be compatible and they will not understand each other's code. For data we have SQL and we have ANSI SQL which makes it partially compatible, that is great, but for general coding... no. And if you want to write a small data app you cannot just fire up FoxPro, you need to install a SQL server of sort, configure it (and that can be a small dark art in cases), get something like VS Code and write in a language that will not be SQL, but will interact also with SQL. Too complex, too complicated, too easy to give up. And if you want to explain to a non-IT person OOP and why a single line of WriteLine('Hello World') needs a class and a method and what is OO using the old story 'imagine you have animals, and some animals are mammals and mammals can inherit properties from the animals class' just to write Hello World on the screen, then we have a problem of accessibility: 'Man, I just want to write 2 words on that bloody screen!'.
So this is why FoxPro was easy to use: just fire it up and write some code, there is not much to prepare and nothing much you can break. And no dependency management, no unsafe downloads from all over the Internet, you can learn everything in a week and forget it in a year.