

Learn the M programming language, and teach it to others. - giulivo
http://opensource.com/health/12/2/join-m-revolution

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bdfh42
M(umps) is the most vile blot upon the landscape of development tools.

It rots any brain that comes into contact with it and destroys all ambitions.

A hideous fate awaits any that pass that way.

Beware - run away - run away.

Teaching Mumps to others should probably be prosecuted on a range of charges -
certainly to inflict this vile heap of crap on anyone in another nation would
be counted a war crime.

~~~
earl
I wrote M/mumps/cachescript professionally for 2 years at epic systems. I
think most sane people's opinion of M can be summarized as

BAD TOUCH! BAD TOUCH!

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DennisP
A great little book that covers some of the history involved is _Best Care
Anywhere: Why VA Healthcare Is Better Than Yours_ by Phillip Longman.

The VistA system used by the VA was developed in bottom-up fashion by doctors
and interns, who snuck minicomputers into the hospitals in defiance of the
mainframe-based IT staff, which went around removing them. One year IT removed
more computers than it installed.

But VistA ended up so well-suited to doctors' needs that it ultimately won.
Now it's open source and is the basis for several national healthcare systems.

It's a complete medical records system, makes it easy to get instant lab
reports, prevents medication errors, etc. About the only thing it doesn't
cover well, for obvious reasons, is dealing with insurance companies.

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jsgrahamus
Great article. I've worked with M for over 2 decades in various healthcare
institutions. It's amazing how it has supported multi-user systems from 286's
to minicomputers (remember them?) to IBM mainframes to today's servers. In one
large company we had the same application running on OpenVMS, Unixware, Linux
and Windows. While there are domains in which it is not appropriate, for
storing and accessing large amounts of indexed data, it is hard to beat.

And the syntax of the base language does not pose the barrier of entry that
some more modern languages might.

Steve

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bragh
The most surprising application I ever saw for MUMPS was the forums for a MUD
named MUME I used to play: <http://elvenrunes.com/cgi-
bin/logs/mumps?rou=stats> (the 'Code:' section)

