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Ask HN: Why should (or shouldn't) I use Intersystem's Cache?
In a post I read from last week about ancient languages still in use I saw some HNers are using Cache. I know a lot of big enterprise systems, such as Epic and Cerner, use Cache, but I haven't been able to find a good reason as for why. So anyone who has had any experience with Cache, or Mumps, what are the use cases for it?
- ksherlock 11y agoThose code bases were started in the mid to late 70s. MUMPS was hot shit at the time, at least for health care software. The language was created at Massachusetts General Hospital (affiliated with Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard), put into the public domain, used be the VA (VistA), and others. Advantages (at the time): freely available, everybody else is using it, easy to learn, interpreted, good performance on resource constrained hardware, multi-process/multi-user support, built in database/persistent storage.
- NetStrikeForce 11y agoOne of my first summer jobs while studying was to help porting an application from MUMPS to Visual Basic. This was probably around the year 2000 and I was working on the UI mostly. I still remember some of my colleagues scratching their heads to properly design the "backend" to make sure there was only one concurrent connection to Cache, as we only had license for one. This was supposed to be an app used by multiple users. I don't remember much more details, apart from the fact that it was this job the one that made me decide I didn't want to be a software developer :) As to why would anyone keep using that DB, I guess the other HNer got it right. Old, ancient code bases that "just work" and no one wants to touch with a barge pole.