Mumps

  This page is part of the OLPC Health Project. Hardware | Software | Content | Health Jam

This page is part of the WorldVistA sub-project.

Porting VistA to the OLPC. For introduction to VistA components see VistA Monograph Wiki.

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Mumps

Mumps is a programming language used primarily in medical and financial information systems.

The back end server for VistA is written in Mumps.

Mumps is an old language. It was born in the days when a 16-bit address space was the state of the art in minicomputers. It shows its age. I has been called obsolete, ugly, ... It is not a fashionable language.

Mumps is scary

Most folks don't get past a negative initial impression and appreciate its strengths. The sample code at the bottom of the Mumps Wikipedia article is pretty scary!

Strengths

• Speed
• Compact data structures in storage
  • If you have less data to move, it's faster
• Tom Munnecke's Semantic Network model of data storage, NEED to gather excerpts from his Hardshats post and ask him to elaborate.

NEED to get larry to tell about performance processing log files and extracting information.

No Young Blood

Mumps programmers are mostly old and gray haired, retiring and becoming a scarce resource.

The Vista Expertise Network is teaching Mumps and beginning a mentorship program pairing new Mumps programmers with retired Mumps experts.

GT.M

For the OLPC WorldVistA project we are using the open source GT.M Mumps compiler.

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