
MUMPS - mises
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS
======
ridiculous_fish
TheDailyWTF has the best MUMPS (horror) stories!

[https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS](https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS)

[https://thedailywtf.com/articles/MUMPS-
Madness](https://thedailywtf.com/articles/MUMPS-Madness)

[https://thedailywtf.com/articles/isn-t-there-a-vaccine-
for-m...](https://thedailywtf.com/articles/isn-t-there-a-vaccine-for-mumps)

~~~
kwhitefoot
MUMPS must be doing something, however small, that is right; otherwise it
would have been exterminated by now, so what is it?

~~~
aawalton
MUMPS (aka M) was actually my first professional programming language at Epic
Systems, the tech giant of the Healthcare space. It’s contemporary with C
(which is also still used), and has several features which were unheard of at
the time.

1\. M bundles a reasonably efficient database with the language itself. Every
variable supports jagged hierarchical arrays (which we usually call objects in
other languages). These were implemented as balanced binary search trees,
which means it’s difficult to write slow operations (at the cost of slightly
sub-optimal performance for everything).

2\. M was designed for massive server/client operations, handling concurrent
use and access by tens of thousands of users out of the box.

3\. M was incredibly terse. We laugh about the horror stories now, but when it
was developed, every byte mattered, so single letter keywords and white-space-
award syntax were features, not bugs.

As a result of these strengths, M solved real problems for large organization,
managing data and concurrency at scale, with a simple storage paradigm that
prioritizes good enough performance all of the time.

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Fins
Maybe one day one of those "DumboDB" things will manage to reinvent MUMPS
without dropping all of its good parts...

