It is useful to note that EPIC (the number 1 ranked commercial EMR four years running?) is also written in ..... MUMPS. Funny, how could that be? David ----- Original Message ----- From: "Adrian Midgley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, December 20, 2003 12:12 AM Subject: Re: Vista on the BBC News Web-site
On Saturday 20 December 2003 01:22, Nandalal Gunaratne wrote: > Thank you for your reply. My concern is that the application is written > in a programming language which is not well known. M is well known. So is the variant of Pascal (Delphi) that the GUI client is written in. There are some misconceptions about programming languages which often go around, probably driven by vendors and by young keen programmers. COBOL, for instance, is a very widely used and well-known language, upon which a large part of commerce is still based, and will be for a long time yet. Many programmers learn it. Large amounts of scientific effort are still supported on Fortran, which I recall from 1974, although when people need to eg handle the UK's telescopes on Hawai in new ways they will write Perl to tie together the mature program objects rather than rewrite and compile the Fortran base. Much of the complexity of a medical record system is carried in its data, so that as time goes on and things change it is data files rather than program objects that need to be changed to reflect it. Not all of course. Rather than a young age of a system being an advantage, let me suggest that writing a large medical IT system and embedding it into a healthcare system takes decades, whereas writing task-specific tools which hopefully share ontology and networking conventions with it should be arranged to be accomplishable in days. -- Dr Adrian Midgley I use Free software because it is better http://www.defoam.net/ They carefully didn't ask.
