Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MUMPS

en.wikipedia.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 75 posts

Re: MUMPS

#41

Post by telecomhacker »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #39
telecomhacker wrote: post #16

Part-time MUMPS programmer here for a health system in NYC. I still love writing in it. The rates are way better than other eco-systems (e.g. Python, Java, blah blah) , probably because the eco-system isn't diluted with low-wage workers from India/China. This is because 95%+ of Epic/Ex-Epic employees are American. I would even argue it is the patriotic language of choice due to that reason. Expected pay of 85-120/hou…

That's far too low if those are current USD figures; you're hurting your and others' incomes by working too cheaply in a niché field. I was making $280k TC as a Rubyist at Meta or $10k/week consulting 10 years ago. That's not anywhere near as niché as Erlang/Elixir/Phoenix, OCaml, embedded Haskell, or embedded Rust. Or COBOL. ;o)

It’s purely remote and super chill. Not everyone wants to work on ads/compete with Indians/Chinese. I’d rather make 200k helping clinicians be more efficient using ML than $300k+ optimizing two tower models to increase the CTR on ads.

Re: MUMPS

#43

Post by roywiggins »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #35
exizt88 wrote: post #6

> OPERATORS: No precedence, executed left to right, parenthesize as desired. 2+3*10 yields 50. How do you even come up with this?

Who came up with math precedence? Why is multiplication done first?

The explanation that makes most sense to me is that it's mostly to avoid having to explicitly write out parentheses a lot of the time. Especially for things like polynomials, which are a bunch of multiplied terms added together, eg 3x+2y and not (3*x)+(2*y). And in polynomials you can even drop the explicit multiplication symbol, so it's much neater. And once you've done this for algebra now you have to do it for plain arithmetic as well to make it all match up, and 3*5+2*7 gives the same answer as evaluating the polynomial at 5,7

Re: MUMPS

#44

Post by dang »

Related. Others?

A Case of the MUMPS (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36268931 - June 2023 (109 comments)

M, or MUMPS is a procedural language with a built-in NoSQL database - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19388048 - March 2019 (2 comments)

MUMPS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18936990 - Jan 2019 (6 comments)

Isn't There a Vaccine for MUMPS? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17898927 - Sept 2018 (2 comments)

Introduction to the Mumps Language (2017) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16309237 - Feb 2018 (42 comments)

The Mumps Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13859961 - March 2017 (178 comments)

MUMPS Instance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13618649 - Feb 2017 (1 comment)

Ask HN: Encryption and Security in MUMPS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13542953 - Feb 2017 (4 comments)

50 year old NoSQL DB that is better than MongoDB - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12791425 - Oct 2016 (2 comments)

MUMPS, the Archaic Health-Care Programming Language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9895311 - July 2015 (49 comments)

I am a MUMPS programmer – Ask me anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6312391 - Sept 2013 (68 comments)

Re: MUMPS

#45

Post by mamcx »

skissane wrote: post #10

The core idea-a language with a built-in persistent key-value store-is actually pretty cool. The classic implementation is filled with horrible warts, although arguably many of them were helpful in squeezing a production multiuser system into the tiny resource constraints of the original 1960s implementation platform (18-bit PDP-7, same machine as Unix was birthed on, although Unix soon moved to the 16-bit PDP-11, wh…

FoxPro(dBase family) was a much better take on the idea.

I also dream of something modern like this (https://tablam.org) but is certainly a significant undertaking. Accept partners!

Re: MUMPS

#46

Post by roywiggins »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #24
EvanAnderson wrote: post #2

Worth linking for a hotter take: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS

S Y=$C(34),X="W ""S Y=$C(34),X=""_Y X ""F %=1:1:6 W $P(X,Y,%),Y,Y"" W Y,"" X X""" X X

I ran across SHA1 implemented in MUMPS once. And handwritten bitwise operations, since MUMPS doesn't have those as operators.

Re: MUMPS

#47

Post by twoodfin »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #20
telecomhacker wrote: post #16

Part-time MUMPS programmer here for a health system in NYC. I still love writing in it. The rates are way better than other eco-systems (e.g. Python, Java, blah blah) , probably because the eco-system isn't diluted with low-wage workers from India/China. This is because 95%+ of Epic/Ex-Epic employees are American. I would even argue it is the patriotic language of choice due to that reason. Expected pay of 85-120/hou…

Makes me curious about getting MUMPS to run locally on a Mac. I had great fun with it 15 years ago.

https://hub.docker.com/r/intersystems/iris-community

Should be super easy.

There’s also a native Apple Silicon tarball that I’m not sure is as easy to get your hands on.

Re: MUMPS

#48

Post by skissane »

mamcx wrote: post #45
skissane wrote: post #10

The core idea-a language with a built-in persistent key-value store-is actually pretty cool. The classic implementation is filled with horrible warts, although arguably many of them were helpful in squeezing a production multiuser system into the tiny resource constraints of the original 1960s implementation platform (18-bit PDP-7, same machine as Unix was birthed on, although Unix soon moved to the 16-bit PDP-11, wh…

FoxPro(dBase family) was a much better take on the idea. I also dream of something modern like this ( https://tablam.org ) but is certainly a significant undertaking. Accept partners!

> FoxPro(dBase family) was a much better take on the idea

xBase is arguably a very different idea - it is based on flat-file/key-indexed databases, akin to VSAM on IBM mainframes, but wrapped in a 4GL. The experience of xBase is very similar to many mainframe 4GLs, what made it distinctive was providing that experience on low-end platforms (it started out on 8-bit CP/M systems, but it was on 16-bit DOS that it really took off)

By contrast, MUMPS has multidimensional associative arrays as a basic data type, and the difference between temporary (in-memory) and persistent (on-disk) arrays is simply whether the variable name is prefixed by a caret. Perl’s tied arrays are close, but tied arrays are a rather peripheral feature of Perl (many Perl code bases never use them), but a central feature of MUMPS

Re: MUMPS

#50

Post by timschmidt »

roywiggins wrote: post #46
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

S Y=$C(34),X="W ""S Y=$C(34),X=""_Y X ""F %=1:1:6 W $P(X,Y,%),Y,Y"" W Y,"" X X""" X X

I ran across SHA1 implemented in MUMPS once. And handwritten bitwise operations, since MUMPS doesn't have those as operators.

Oof. Unrelated to MUMPS, but the worst I've ever run into was a reimplementation of PHP's register_globals 20 years after it'd been patched out as a security nightmare, because the developer enjoyed the convenience.
Post reply on HN