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Sorry, I can't hop on board. My opinion is that implementing anything complex and new in ANSI MUMPS would be irresponsible given the better options available.

Sorry, I can't hop on board. My opinion is that implementing anything complex and new in ANSI MUMPS would be irresponsible given the better options available. > It has limited commands and is whitespace-aware Limited commands to a certain extent just means a more dangerous language. Being able to give functions private scope is something that's really important to me personally, as is having named constants, and objects with methods. About whitespace awareness, I consider it a fascinating design choice that the difference between one or two spaces between tokens within the same line of code can mean different things. > Newer developers can jump right into M, precisely because it lacks higher-level abstractions like first-class functions or closures. The language does not support first-class functions, but it does support the "xecute" command for running arbitrary code strings, which is particularly risky if you ever use user inputs as parameters in the strings you try to xecute. Also, I primarily want knowledgeable developers working on my healthcare and financial systems, not the newer ones who would somehow be incapable of using a first-class function. > wicked fast at reads and writes. Great for a fast key-value store. This isn't a differentiating feature. > you're very unlikely to find a bug because it's been in production so long. This makes it good for mission-critical applications like healthcare and finance. What happens when you need to change the code? Do you wait a long time until bugs are no longer found?

__float 10y ago
You can have variable scoping, just use `new`? I think that fast reads/writes actually are a reasonably differentiating feature--if you want something like that in JS, Python, .... you're going to have to drop down to a C extension, and you'll have to put a lot of effort into that being portable. In a MUMPS interpreter, it's already there and it already works reliably.
- rnprince 10y ago
  The scoping issue I mentioned was function scoping, not variable scoping. The language would be better for organizing code if it supported functions as methods of particular classes of objects, or functions with private scope. As a codebase gets large, how well organized the code is makes a big difference in how easy and how risky it is to change things, so it really pays for your language to make code organization as natural as possible. I am actually not able to find statistics matching up M databases with non-M databases at the moment, but I'd be interested in seeing something like that. I don't know what you mean about having to roll your own C extension to talk to your database.

__float 10y ago

You can have variable scoping, just use `new`? I think that fast reads/writes actually are a reasonably differentiating feature--if you want something like that in JS, Python, .... you're going to have to drop down to a C extension, and you'll have to put a lot of effort into that being portable. In a MUMPS interpreter, it's already there and it already works reliably.

rnprince 10y ago
The scoping issue I mentioned was function scoping, not variable scoping. The language would be better for organizing code if it supported functions as methods of particular classes of objects, or functions with private scope. As a codebase gets large, how well organized the code is makes a big difference in how easy and how risky it is to change things, so it really pays for your language to make code organization as natural as possible. I am actually not able to find statistics matching up M databases with non-M databases at the moment, but I'd be interested in seeing something like that. I don't know what you mean about having to roll your own C extension to talk to your database.