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Vista is ancient, and it's written in MUMPS, an evil twin of COBOL.
by cyberax 1y ago
Vista is ancient, and it's written in MUMPS, an evil twin of COBOL.
- mattkrause 1y agoFor context, many (most?) other EHRs are too, though they call it M now so it sounds less disease-ridden.
- vincent-manis 1y agoNo, MUMPS (or M) is a remote descendant of JOSS, an interactive language of the 1950s. JOSS has all sorts of variants (DEC's FOCAL language of the 1960s was a dialect), but I think MUMPS is the only living one. MUMPS code is mostly unreadable, as the commands can be, and often are, abbreviated to the first letter. As a result, it looks a lot like line noise. Regardless of its many warts, Cobol cannot be accused of being unreadable. Verbose, yes.
- nradov 1y agoMUMPS was originally developed in the 1960s for use on minicomputers that had maybe 64KB RAM. At the time it was a lot more important to keep code size small, hence the single letter commands. Readability wasn't a concern then but it sure looks like a mess today.
- vintermann 1y agoIt's hard to imagine it's an improvement over just the raw assembly.
- nradov 1y agoImagine harder. It was an enormous improvement over assembly language. Not so much for the basic coding but for the portability and built-in persistent data structures. MUMPS has an excellent "NoSQL" database built in which is a pretty good fit for a lot of healthcare use cases.
- cyberax 1y ago> Regardless of its many warts, Cobol cannot be accused of being unreadable. Verbose, yes. Hence the "evil twin" comment :)