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

51–60 of 75 posts

Re: MUMPS

#51

Post by coderjames »

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…

> I always thought it was weird that I had to apply with my transcripts and resume.

I similarly thought it weird when Garmin asked me for transcripts when I applied there a few years ago. It had been 15 years since I'd graduated, so I was lucky I still had a couple copies of my official transcripts from back then. After spending the effort to find and scan them in with my 3.8 GPA, didn't even get a phone screen.

Re: MUMPS

#53

Post by roywiggins »

timschmidt wrote: post #50
roywiggins wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One fun thing about MUMPS is that if you don't use the newfangled "new" keyword when declaring them, variables iirc are all global to the file. Or record, or whatever not-quite-a-file entity contains source code in MUMPS systems (8 character hard limit on filenames)

And of course some code ends up relying on ambient global state to function properly, so the codebase is strewn with "environment setting" methods that set up the required globals before you call the functions that rely on them.

The other fun one iirc is that calling a function inside the "true" branch of an IF can clobber the global TEST flag and cause the "false" branch to execute as well, since the "else" keyword relies on $TEST to decide what to do. The fix is to end it with a noop "if true" to unclobber $TEST.

The other worst MUMPS code was MUMPS code that used string concatenation to generate more MUMPS code from the worst DSL you've ever seen, MUMPS code that seemed to partially implement a MUMPS interpreter...

Re: MUMPS

#54

Post by caycep »

vwem wrote: post #33
kiernanmcgowan wrote: post #3

Hey there to all the EPIC kids poking their head in this thread. Where did you all end up post-EPIC?

Went to a smaller company for a short time, than ended up at FAANGs. Epic had some nice features and it was really cool working directly with nurses and doctors. But it has some churn issues and the software sucks to use, especially with Epic's insistence on "all software built in house". While a good marketing ploy, it results in reinventing crappier wheels.

as a long suffering user, it always seemed like an ancient enterprise app. Always have to log in through some horrible Citrix setup to use it too...

Re: MUMPS

#56

Post by chrchr »

valleyer wrote: post #11
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?

Because it's dead-simple to parse? Remember that not all machines back then had hardware call-stacks.

This approach is, arguably, more readable because it relies on a simple left-to-right evaluation. Programmers don't have to recall the complex, though often familiar, rules of operator precedence.

Re: MUMPS

#57

Post by jaybrendansmith »

Way back in the day, while bored at my SaaS MUMPS support job, I wrote a version of the 'artillery' game in MUMPS, complete with graphics and explosions. I still wish I had that code somewhere :)

Re: MUMPS

#58

Post by analog31 »

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…

The GPA of 3.5 is their minimum for considering a candidate.

Re: MUMPS

#59

Post by UltraSane »

I worked at Epic the EMR company that probably has written more lines of M than any other company. Their EMR suite is the most popular in the US. They have a very high ratio of testers to programmers and I always wondered if this is because their ancient M code base is very brittle.

Re: MUMPS

#60

Post by UltraSane »

Dig1t wrote: post #37
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…

Man this is an interesting comment. >probably because the eco-system isn't diluted with low-wage workers from India/China. Are there other technologies like MUMPS that have the same characteristics?

Not technology but you need to be a US citizen to get a security clearance for jobs that require one.
Post reply on HN