On Saturday, January 26, 2013 1:05:21 PM UTC, ajlopez wrote:

> Yes, very interesting....
>
> I remember Mumps from a Computer Language (or Dr. Dobb's?) article from 
> the eighties.
>
> Any tutorial links for Mumps Globals?
>
>  
See:

http://www.mgateway.com/docs/universalNoSQL.pdf

and my rather older paper:

http://gradvs1.mgateway.com/download/extreme1.pdf 

Forget the Mumps language, but its database is very powerful. A NoSQL 
database that pre-dates the NoSQL movement by several decades!

Of course, the message I'm trying to get across is that all that 
Mumps-based healthcare stuff out there is in desperate need of a new 
generation of developers to support and modernise it.  To that end it's a 
huge industry reliant on a dwindling population of ageing developers (sadly 
I have to admit I'm one of those ageing guys! :-).  

That Mumps-based stuff isn't going to disappear in a hurry either.  As the 
US Dept of Veterans Affairs have found to their cost (several $b in fact), 
it's not a problem that can be tackled by a rip and replace rewrite, no 
matter how many $$$ and experts you throw at the problem: this stuff is 
just too big a legacy of code. And actually, the Mumps database is very 
good at handling healthcare data (hardly surprising since it was 
specifically designed for managing healthcare data), so it would be pretty 
dumb to throw that baby out with the bathwater.

On the other hand, Javascript is ideally suited for integrating with and 
manipulating Mumps-based data (as my blog postings and other articles aim 
to demonstrate), and, through the Node.js interfaces that are now 
available, it's possible to invoke and therefore encapsulate and abstract 
the existing Mumps programming logic, at least as an initial stop-gap while 
a gradual, measured and low-risk migration to Javascript logic can take 
place over time.  

Along the way, I'm hopeful that the new generation of Node.js/Javascript 
developers will discover some of the coolness of the Mumps database and 
think of new ways of using it as another member of the growing NoSQL 
database ecosystem, but that's a nice-to-have.  I think the really 
important issue here is if and how the Node.js development community can 
come to the rescue of all that Mumps-based healthcare software that 
pretty-much dominates the healthcare sector worldwide.

Rob






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