(This was in contrast to older programming languages such as C or COBOL where due to published official standards, carefully developed code could possibly be run in a wide range of software environments.)
Once Borland acquired Ashton-Tate in mid-1991 (and was apparently required to drop the lawsuits as an antitrust related condition of the merger), such standardization efforts were given new life.
Marc Schnapp was the first chairman, and the first meeting was held at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California which was essentially the birthplace of Vulcan and dBASE II.
1993 was pivotal for the xBase community because, as previously noted, Ashton-Tate had earlier sold dBASE as well as the rest of their product line to Borland and Microsoft had purchased FoxPro from Fox Software.
Meta-programming generally does not work as well with mouse-oriented techniques because automating mouse movements can require calculating and processing of screen coordinates, something most developers find tedious and difficult to debug.
Compiling improved overall run-time speed and source-code security, but at the expense of an interpreted mode for interactive development or ad-hoc projects.