
Ask HN: Why should (or shouldn't) I use Intersystem's Cache? - jklein11
In a post I read from last week about ancient languages still in use I saw some HNers are using Cache. I know a lot of big enterprise systems, such as Epic and Cerner, use Cache, but I haven&#x27;t been able to find a good reason as for why. So anyone who has had any experience with Cache, or Mumps, what are the use cases for it?
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NetStrikeForce
One of my first summer jobs while studying was to help porting an application
from MUMPS to Visual Basic. This was probably around the year 2000 and I was
working on the UI mostly.

I still remember some of my colleagues scratching their heads to properly
design the "backend" to make sure there was only one concurrent connection to
Cache, as we only had license for one. This was supposed to be an app used by
multiple users.

I don't remember much more details, apart from the fact that it was this job
the one that made me decide I didn't want to be a software developer :)

As to why would anyone keep using that DB, I guess the other HNer got it
right. Old, ancient code bases that "just work" and no one wants to touch with
a barge pole.

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ksherlock
Those code bases were started in the mid to late 70s. MUMPS was hot shit at
the time, at least for health care software. The language was created at
Massachusetts General Hospital (affiliated with Dana Farber Cancer Institute
and Harvard), put into the public domain, used be the VA (VistA), and others.

Advantages (at the time): freely available, everybody else is using it, easy
to learn, interpreted, good performance on resource constrained hardware,
multi-process/multi-user support, built in database/persistent storage.

