Comment by atombender
12 years ago
A lot of systems — legacy and current — are written in MUMPS. Historically MUMPS has been very popular in health care systems (where it originated), and I believe it's still huge there; it is used and supported by a number of niche companies for things like patient data.
In other words, MUMPS is a platform and an ecosystem as much as a language. Think of Java or Ruby — for a lot of companies, including MUMPS shops, staying with a specific "sub-ecosystem" is simply the most rational choice because they have so much invested it already.
If you look beyond tech that is currently considered "bleeding edge" — Go, JavaScript, Ruby and so forth — you will find a lot of companies who rely on what you may consider weird or even legacy software. For example, Delphi (a descendant of Borland's Turbo Pascal which is still based on ObjectPascal) is still very popular. In finance, languages like K are still popular. I believe finance still has a ton of stuff based on object databases such as Objectivity/DB, Versant, Matisse and GemStone (Smalltalk), which actually look a lot like today's document-oriented databases. InterSystems Caché, which is based on MUMPS, is a hybrid SQL/OODBMS. In other words, the software market has a lot of aging technology that is still working superbly for the parties involved. Old code is usually proven code.
InterSystems Caché is more like UNIX than it is like, let's say, MongoDB. Make the bottom of it efficient - that's where the runtime and the B-tree storage operate - and you can build a world on top. SQL from tables to views to indices, all the ORM and things like classes and MVC are implemented mostly as macros. And it works pretty well.
Sure. I didn't mean to include Caché when I referred to newer document-oriented databases. Caché has a different architecture. It's more similar in design to K and Kdb [1], I suppose, which is also heavily based around vector operations on persistent arrays.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language)
You are right about healthcare, for example the entire US Veteran's Administration runs on MUMPS and I think epic systems also use cache. This area is ripe for disruption, they've been stuck with the same legacy stuff for 30 years.