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For the curious, newer versions of MUMPS are still used as the core database framework by a lot of electronic health records companies. Most notably, it’s the backbone of Epic Systems, the largest EHR company in the US.
For the curious, newer versions of MUMPS are still used as the core database framework by a lot of electronic health records companies. Most notably, it’s the backbone of Epic Systems, the largest EHR company in the US.
At least the front end is much more modern.
I’ve been working on a project to celebrate the anniversary of MUMPS and its first standard. For those unfamiliar, MUMPS is an imperative language famously born at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1966. Its defining characteristic is that the language and the database are deeply integrated, acting as an early NoSQL database decades before the term existed. See here for more information about the project: https://git…
I’ve been working on a project to celebrate the anniversary of MUMPS and its first standard. For those unfamiliar, MUMPS is an imperative language famously born at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1966. Its defining characteristic is that the language and the database are deeply integrated, acting as an early NoSQL database decades before the term existed. See here for more information about the project: https://git…
I protest the characterization of Smalltalk as legacy. Seeing Cedar mentioned was very cool - Cedar/Mesa along with Trellis/Owl were environments I was very interested in during my late high school / early college days, though I had no access to either. I do have a lot of Trellis documentation lying around somewhere someone at DEC kindly sent me when I wrote them about it.
It's about a Smalltalk-80 image from 1983.
Trellis/Owl had interesting ideas, though I spent more time with Modula-3.
Did they really have to use KILL as the word to delete a variable? Especially as it's used in hospitals? KILL patient....?
For the curious, newer versions of MUMPS are still used as the core database framework by a lot of electronic health records companies. Most notably, it’s the backbone of Epic Systems, the largest EHR company in the US.
That was very disappointing to read. We might be migrating from an old M system (Meditech Magic) to a new M system (Epic). At least the front end is much more modern.
obligatory reference: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/a_case_of_the_mumps
This article is terrible and I hate that people always bring it up whenever MUMPS is mentioned here. MUMPS is easy to read, understand and maintain when written well. These examples (and the Wikipedia ones) are from code written when hospitals needed to run their whole EMR with extreme storage constraints, so more terse code was necessary to fit more on the disk. Of course they aren’t readable by modern standards.
Good times
MUMPS’ bad reputation is totally unearned. Most examples online (the wiki page, the awful Case of the MUMPS article) are examples of MUMPS code from the 60s-70s when storage was a premium and enterprise-size programs had to fit in a handful of megabytes, so there was no room for readability. MUMPS code is more readable than most languages, it’s very simple and procedural. And the ability to interact directly with dur…
Did they really have to use KILL as the word to delete a variable? Especially as it's used in hospitals? KILL patient....?