From “Heast as nit” to “Walk My Walk” – Why AI might just be the best thing that could happen to the old FiveWin crowd
If you drop by the FiveWin forum these days, it feels a bit like listening to Hubert von Goisern’s old song “Heast as nit” (“Don’t you hear how time goes by?”).
Just yesterday (at least it feels that way) we were passionately debating Clipper vs. Summer ’87, DBF structures, the perfect GET/READ behaviour, the pros and cons of xBrowse, TopClass vs. FiveWin vs. VO, and how to make a dialog look decent under Windows XP.
Today many of the familiar voices have grown quieter or vanished completely. The “young guns” of the 90s and 2000s are getting grey, some of the real old-timers are no longer with us, and what once felt timeless – PRG files, RDDs, TBrowse, Windows dialogs – has quietly turned into what the rest of the world now calls “legacy”.
That’s simply the story of software development we all lived through:
16-bit DOS → 32-bit Windows → OOP and GUI → Web → Microservices → Cloud → AI.
What felt rock-solid and modern was always just a temporary stop. Yesterday became today, and today will soon be tomorrow.
And right into this gentle, slightly melancholic “Heast as nit” moment, AI comes crashing in.
For many of us the first reaction is unease, even fear – another thing that feels like “this is no longer our world”.
But if you look closer, AI is actually a gift for exactly our generation of developers.
All the tedious detail work that used to eat days – obscure syntax variants, endless API quirks, miles of boilerplate code, hunting down that one parameter that makes everything work under Windows 11 – we can finally hand that over to the assistant.
The machine is simply better and faster at that stuff than we ever were.
What’s left for us is exactly where our decades of experience still shine:
concept, architecture, understanding the real problem, asking the right questions.
Instead of wrestling for hours with yet another special case in a grid control, we can finally ask again:
“What should this program actually improve in a user’s daily life? How does it fit into the bigger picture? What would be truly useful?”
That’s why now is the perfect time to revive the conversation in this forum – real conversation between us humans.
AI can help us think, design, prototype, and even write production-ready code in minutes.
But doubting, encouraging each other, discussing ideas, drawing boundaries, and dreaming up new projects together – that’s still something only we can do.
If we let the assistant take care of the technical trivia and start talking again about concepts, program ideas, and maybe even joint open-source projects, then AI won’t be the end of our little world.
It will put the excitement back into it.
Technical acceleration through AI on one side, and a conscious return to real discussions, shared experience, and old (and new) friendships on the other – maybe that’s the unique chance of our time.
So yes, time flies – “Heast as nit”.
But for the first time in many years I’m genuinely curious again about what we could still build together.
Who’s in?
Best regards,
Otto
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfJMJw3uwxk
Don’t you hear
how time slips away?
Just yesterday
people spoke in a completely different way.
The young have grown old
and the old have passed away.
And yesterday has turned into today,
and today will soon be tomorrow.
Don’t you hear,
don’t you hear,
how time slips away,
don’t you hear how time slips away …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfHIRtAUuMM
