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Re: VistA and MUMPS: Big, Ugly and Proud
by Richard Steven Hack on Wednesday November 02, @12:22PM
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Sorry, the notion that Mumps is somehow superior because "CS graduates" don't like it is itself elitist and incorrect.
I read about Mumps many years ago. I also read about the Forth language - anoth oddball language. One consultant was using Forth to create his own "custom operating systems" for his clients.
And when he drops dead, who supports that crap?
The article admits that nobody can maintain a system built in Mumps because it's "too big to rewrite all at once". This is the same excuse used by large corporations for continuing to develop in an obsolete language like COBOL.
Some years back one of the major insurance companies wanted to sue the COBOL Standards Committee for introducing a new standard for COBOL because they'd just spent ten years upgrading millions of lines of COBOL code to the last new standard and couldn't afford to do it again. This insurance company has a 250-man Computer Science department WITHIN their IT department.
I said if they can't convert their old COBOL code in less than ten years with a 250-man CS department PLUS hundreds of regular IT programmers, they need to go out of business.
Sorry, it won't wash. You either bite the bullet now and rewrite in a more modern language, or you TAKE the bullet later when you HAVE to.
I don't care what Mumps is capable of - if it was a barn-burner, more people would be using it instead of C, C++, Java, etc. Nobody can tell me that any given computer language is somehow better suited for medical apps than the languages in current use everywhere else in every other domain of enterprise.
I'm not saying Mumps may not have features that could be profitably installed in more modern languages. But to suggest that Mumps, designed back in the 1960's when NOBODY had a clue how to design computer languages - and there ARE principles for that endeavor, folks - and ignored by virtually everybody in the industry since, is somehow superior for medical apps...no chance.
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