Comment by koolba
16 hours ago
Neat stuff. For more esoteric environments that could use this type of automated leg up, check out MUMPS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
There's a bunch of mainly legacy hospital and government (primarily VA) systems that run on it. And where there's big government systems, there's big government dollars.
Thanks for sharing. It seems MUMPS is just as old and legacy as some of the COBOL systems!
I was offered a MUMPS job in the 1980s. I took one look at the code and very quickly concluded that life was too short for that.
Later I got into programming language theory, and took another look at MUMPS from that perspective. As a programming language, it’s truly terrible in ways that languages like COBOL and FORTRAN are not. Just as one example, “local” variables have an indefinite lifetime and are accessible throughout a process, i.e. they’re not scoped to functions. But you can dynamically hide/shadow and delete them. It would be hard to design a less tractable way of managing variables if you tried.
MUMPS’ value proposition was how it handled persistent data as a built-in part of the language. In that sense it was a precursor to systems like dBASE, which were eventually supplanted by SQL databases. MUMPS was a pretty good persistent data management system coupled with a truly terrible programming language.