Hi Chris, et. al.,
I am out of the woodwork. Cache and MUMPS offer capabilities not found in
most ohter languages.
For a newcomer, MUMPS is easy to write, but hard to read. This is why one of
the first tools a newcomer will write is a pretty printer. Once getting over
the intial shock of being able to abeviate the commands, most (not all, I
still write full commands) will begin to abbreviate the commads.
As Chris mentioned, I have written a MUMPS to C++ transformer, but
fortunately, have never done a transformation except as a proof of concept.
The main reason I wrote the transformer in the first place, is to convince
OTP (Otherwise Intellegent People) that by translating their applications to
C or C++, they are only translating their problem. The message I send them
is "don't kill the language, kill the programmer", because with power comes
responsibility, and if the application failed, the programmer failed.
Some Cache/MUMPS aplplications, like VistA are stable, and I grant you
although, no sotware application is perfect, VistA is carefully maintained.
In my entire career, I have only written one application that ran the first
time, and no one ever found a bug in it. The only reason the program worked
correctly the first time, is because in the early days, computer time was
very expensive, and we spend days/weeks reviewing our code before running
the application on the computer.
The power I have enjoyed from Cache/MUMPS, after having to interface with
databases from other languages is that I have direct access to the data. The
problem with other languages is that databases are an afterthought, and like
any other Kludge, it can be ugly, even if it works (somewhat).
Most languages (I lost count of how many I use) were created for a specific
problem, and they do well when they are used for the problems they were
created for. MUMPS was created to satisfy the needs of the medical world,
and it did very well for many years. The only reason I have switched from
MUMPS to Cache is that it gives me backward compatibility with MUMPS, a good
database, and I can write object-oriented applications that are easier to
maintain, and easier to interface with other technologies.
OK, I am returning to observer mode.
Bob
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