• city.wok (unregistered) in reply to Flo

    Brian had to have worked at Meditech. Retroactive enhancements retroactively to customer's needs. Not enough staff to be proactive.

  • city.wok (unregistered) in reply to Flo

    Brian had to have worked at [redacted]. Retroactive enhancements retroactively to customer's needs. Not enough staff to be proactive.

  • Robert (unregistered) in reply to Flo

    Haha... but the site having lousy standards doesn't make the language bad. In fact Mumps executed very fast (for its time) & I'vd never had more fun using a programming language. It's not quite 'out there on its own' though; I've used other interpretive languages and there are similarities... I only wish the companies had chosen Mumps instead of their home grown languages. Of course it's especially hard to read if you're not usec to it... and, to be honest, it never looks pretty, but its Mumps flexibility that allowed it to be abused. Nonetheless, I'm not sure it belongs in the 21st century.

  • Dave (unregistered)

    I'm pretty sure I worked at that company.

    It really wasn't that bad. It was my first job, I left after 2 years (because I wanted to live elsewhere), and easily found another job. The MUMPs was way better than VB6.

    Sounds like Bryan is blaming others for his own shortcomings...

  • John (unregistered)

    I'm looking for a better employment opportunity than my current one. I came across an advertised position for a Java+MUMPS developer the other day. Thank God I saw this post on The Daily WTF in the past so I could cringe in terror and not apply for that job...

  • A MUMPS programmer (unregistered) in reply to Robert

    It's easy to cast aspersions against MUMPS, and I find more often than not, it is people that are afraid of it, and have never even tried to learn and use it that have given it a "bad rap".

    It has it all OVER the "idiot languages" where you point and click at snippets of code to make your application.

    This is actual CODE WRITING - yes it requires an actual BRAIN to effectively write in it.

    Actually, I feel it should be embraced world wide instead of some of the point and click crap that is "of the moment" - that is until the next "something better" comes along.

    Try it you'll LIKE it! :)

  • MUMPS - Ugh (unregistered) in reply to A MUMPS programmer

    It is a large part of my job to write MUMPS, which I have been doing for years. I am as adept at is as one can get. I have been complimented on the clarity and quality of my code. After having just written a simply huge amount of MUMPS recently, I have to say I still hate it. It is simply, perhaps empirically, an awful language.

  • Noreen (unregistered) in reply to tharfagreinir

    If Brian is looking for a job still. Get in touch with me

  • not found anything better (unregistered) in reply to Robert

    I now code in Java, but used look back longingly at the MUMPS I used to write. It seems that Java is doing everything it can to make it work like MUMPS! Dependency injection, reflection, JPA! These things bring it to what MUMPS had innately. Big data is all about killing the RDBMS as being too slow. Client Server tried to kill MUMPS and failed, as we are now back at thin client and server side processing. Have you seen a badly written Java program! Crap programmers write crap code! I have yet to find anything quicker for developing in than MUMPS, although I use Python and PHP a lot now and they are close, but not close enough.

  • Mack Altman (unregistered) in reply to not found anything better

    Some of the biggest industries utilize mumps databases, particularly Intersystems Cache. These industries include the Financial, Health, and Transportation industries. Mumps is very versatile. The only reason it doesn't work is that programmers become complacent. Several are still programming in Cache 2010+ with deprecated functions from Cache <5.

    On a side note, I came from PHP thinking it was "so hard" when really it's just as easy to understand as Java or PHP.

  • Magic Man (unregistered)

    What an entertaining read, I can't believe this thread started over 8 years ago, maybe Brian has found his bliss as a Walmart greeter. Mumps, M or Magic (proprietary mumps) technology are light years ahead of any of these new .NET Microsoft crap. Its called the FLAT OPERATING system that makes M so advanced, its something that will never be improved upon, take it from the Magic Man :o)

  • boz (unregistered) in reply to Flo

    Sadly, that made perfect sense to me! It's not even the worst I've seen :)

  • w.levetzow (unregistered)

    From Hamburg-Germany We are thinking in Analogies and Hirarchies and Recoursions. With Mumps we can all. But we need more Mumps-Connections to other A.I.(Artificial Languages )-Languages. Ideas of Linux based Mumps from GT.M and better Installing Routines in LINUX is my Hope...

  • jim (unregistered) in reply to gwenhwyfaer
    Come to think of it, this probably explains a lot about the popularity of C++ or Java - anyone who's been using anything else for longer than six months is magically unemployable.

    I did java for 8 years, dropped out for 6 to practice law and then jumped back in with no problem at all.

  • Mark (unregistered)

    Interestingly, Epic Systems has been growing and apparently taking over the Healthcare installed base of Clinical software.. My own hospital will begin implementation shortly.. What is Epic written in? MUMPS.. So here I am, a C#.Net developer, looking for some way to learn and get up-to-speed in MUMPS. Moral to this story? Be careful where you cast your aspersions.. You never know what the future may hold..

  • lolwut mumps (unregistered)

    Using MUMPS develops an important ability for programmers of any language: the ability to actually create a program and not 'assemble' pre made pieces.

  • Rick (unregistered)

    COBOL programmer of 37 years here. Looks like learning MUMPS/Cache might be worthwhile for where my job and company I work for is at right now. Any suggestions where to start?

  • Gringo (unregistered) in reply to Rick

    Rick, spin up a fresh VM and install a copy of GT.M in it. Manuals for it and the language itself are available on the 'net.

  • important ability indeed (unregistered) in reply to lolwut mumps

    Clearly very important ability for employees to develop in any high tech companies. As we all know, no big name schools teaches their student such skill creating programs in their first year CS curriculums. I'm also certain that big companies do not use such skill assessments when they interview new programmers. Assembling pre-made pieces is also a very overrated skill for programmer of any language.

  • important ability indeed (unregistered) in reply to lolwut mumps

    Clearly very important ability for employees to develop in any high tech companies. As we all know, no big name schools teaches their student such skill creating programs in their first year CS curriculums. I'm also certain that big companies do not use such skill assessments when they interview new programmers. Assembling pre-made pieces is also a very overrated skill for programmer of any language.

  • M-developer (unregistered)

    MUMPS routines are as terse, verbose, simple or convoluted as the programmer wants them to be. The creativity that is allowed by MUMPS is beyond most other languages. There are numerous ways to code the same algorithm. True Professional programmers design their programs to be easy to read and maintain, and M allows this. Having witnesses benchmark tests, I can say without a doubt that M Database functions are a magnitude faster than the other Database systems. And these observations are not Kool-Aid inspired.

  • rpiguy (unregistered) in reply to CDarklock

    This comment has aged well.

  • raccoon (unregistered)

    Well, in Finland we actually bought ^&%$#@$ expensive health care system orchestrated by (insert sarcasm here) fine Accenture, and guess what is the company that delivers the system? Epic. Language? MUMPS. This is 2020.

    Way to Accenture. Way to go Finland, and all the idiots who thought this is a fine idea.

  • former-m-guy (unregistered)

    The issues with Epic are not with M, trust me.

    M is a really underrated language, and in the age of NOSQL databases would be a good competitor if it had any open source tooling and libraries, and if the syntax was updated (whitespace shouldn't affect commands). It runs much faster than competitors and is easy to read and understand if you do it right.

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  • Tony (unregistered)

    I know this is the dailyWTF but you guys are off-base. You're laughing at things you don't understand.

    Mumps is older than Unix. Mumps is older than C. It's the oldest language still in use with the possible exception of some bastardized assembler language for a forgotten IBM mainframe.

    Mumps predates LEX and YACC (obviously) and most grammar theory. If you wanted a language in 1966, you had to write it yourself and you would be lucky to have 2k bits of core memory in which to do it. It was a different time so the syntax is dicey by today's standards. The code-and-database-as-one was very innovative though its time has passed. The mumps database is hierarchical and in that regard it is very nice.

    On Jan 2nd of 2024, mumps is still running all VA hospitals and doing a good job despite what you might hear. Much of that code hasn't been changed in 20+ years because it simply works. The mumps example shared in a pinned post on page 1 is literally VA code from 1992. That's 30 year old code that's still in service. Most code we write barely lasts a year if we're lucky.

    Mumps is among the most wildly successful languages you'll ever see. Laughing at Mumps is like laughing at a T-Rex because they went extinct after 25 million years.

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