Yes, I do, as physician. This is all internal, nothing is or will be published (but I wouldn't care/mind releasing the code, when and if I have it). The way to think of this is: I could be typing stuff out on Word, or I could use the hospital's buggy and horrible software. But I'll just roll my own, like I did last year on another job (the FORTH thing - which is abandoware right now, although it served me well).
This is isn't complex software, you know? This is very stupid stuff. (But I do realize people make money selling stupid software for physicians...). What I think I can achieve with Scheme is printing directly on a .jpeg image (the hospital's layout form for recipes), using Racket's imaging library. This would be...fun! AND useful. In a more advanced stage, I can play with optimization and constraints (e.g., calculating how to properly fit stuff on the page, etc.) Another thing I want to write is software to monitor our 300 diabetic/hypertensive patients. I had some great ideas looking at Scheme's graphic capabilities. This would be something spreadsheet-like, with various (graphical) bells and whistles for alerts (such as renal function parameters, global cardiovascular risk, etc.) We're not a a big hospital complex in the USA. We're in a big public health hospital complex in southern Brazil. Our hospital doesn't have the cash for the latest and greatest for medical software. However, I still prefer my shorthand DSL than anything else I've seen. You show "HCTZ25 30P 1XD or OMZ20 30P 1P/M" to *any* doctor and I'm willing to bet they'll IMMEDIATELY grok what it means. That's the power of a proper DSL. And, when and if I write this thing, it'll be for me and my colleague only (that's 3.000 patients), possibly extending to the rest of the team (that would be 9.000 patients). So, internal, in-house. Who knows when I'll have this. I'm a busy physician (like all of us). If I have to start reading advanced mumbo-jumbo or papers with denotational semantics in order to understand what in the world is the matter with EVAL in Racket Scheme, I might just give up and go back to Win32 API (easier, right?) and my proprietary/licensed FORTH that can ship executables (royalty-free). (I'm wasting too much time here, when I should be testing the answers the fine Racketeers have provided me with) ;-) Cheers, Henry Lenzi Cheers, Henry Lenzi Cheers, Henry Lenzi On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 10:02 PM, Robby Findler <ro...@eecs.northwestern.edu> wrote: > Hi Henry: do you work in the heath system? If you have any pointers > I'd be interested to read about your work and how you use things like > Forth (or maybe someday, Racket! :) in that work. > > Best, > Robby > > On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 7:49 PM, Henry Lenzi <henry.le...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Hi Daniel -- >> >> Do you mean the Forth files? >> I don't belienve they would make much sense to you, but it would go >> something like this (as you can see, that is a FORTH definition): >> >> : NAME S"John Doe" >> CU4 >> HCTZ25 30P 1CPM >> OMZ20 30P 1CPM INSTOMZ >> SIMVA20 30P 1CPN >> L\D ; >> >> Expands to (NOTE: Some things are germane to our public health >> system, such as renewing "continuous use" gratis medications, recipe >> valid for 4 months): >> >> John Doe >> >> Continuous use - 4 months >> >> Hydrochlorothiazide 25mg ---------------- 30 pills >> >> Take 1 pill P.O. in the morning. >> >> Omeprazol 20mg ----------------------------- 30 pills >> >> Take 1 pill P.O. in the morning, 1/2 hour >> before breakfast. >> >> Simvastatin 20mg ---------------------------- 30 pills >> >> Take 1 pill P.O. at night. >> >> City, xx/xx/xxxx >> >> >> So what´s happening here is that inside the FORTH definition, >> everything delimited by ":" and ";" is a FORTH word, as they say, that >> is to say, valid FORTH code. >> The very cheap trick here is simply writing a file with plain text >> (but called .fth, .f or other FORTH designations for filetypes) >> begining with a ":", ending with a ";", and everything in between, >> which are the FORTH words. >> The FORTH reader than opens this file. As soon as it hits the ":", it >> recognizes it's FORTH code. It's all amazingly stupid. However, what >> you get is: a DSL hassle-free (no parsing/lexing), a flat-file >> database for free (the name of the files), an interpreter (comes with >> the territory). And code is data, data is code, in a very, very >> concrete way. >> >> >> Cheers, >> >> Henry Lenzi >> >> >> >> >> >> >> On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 6:29 PM, Daniel Prager >> <daniel.a.pra...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> Hi Henry >>> >>> Racket is very suitable for writing DSLs, or even whole Ls (more advanced!). >>> As you'd expect, the idioms for DSL construction in straight Racket are >>> different from those in Forth and will take a bit of familiarization and >>> adjustment. >>> >>> Would you be willing to share a more fully-fledged example of a shorthand >>> medical recipe (input) and reconstructed recipe (output) so that the Racket >>> Community can better understand what sounds like a very worthwhile project? >>> >>> >>> Dan >>> >>> >>> On Tue, Jul 29, 2014 at 6:21 AM, Henry Lenzi <henry.le...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>>> Of course, the ultimate purpose would be to re-evaluate the imported >>>> symbol and reconstruct a medical recipe. The purpose of these >>>> baby-steps exercises is porting a medical recipe program I've written >>>> originally in Forth that allowed me to service 5.000 patients creating >>>> a little database of shorthand recipes that then expand into real >>>> medical recipes. I got hundreds of patients on renewable recipes for, >>>> say, hypertension. Hand writing is no fun. Typing them in Word is no >>>> fun. The hospital has is its own software, but it's is a load of >>>> baloney, extremely buggy, if you ask me, so I'm rolling my own again, >>>> except I want to print directly on the model paper our service uses, >>>> so I want graphics like Racket Scheme has (very good capabilities, as >>>> far as my needs are concerned). >>>> >>>> With Forth, it's very easy to design DSLs, because there's no syntax >>>> and you get a lot of advanced features for free. For instance, there's >>>> no need to write a parser for my little language. However, since Forth >>>> implementations fall short of dealing with images, graphics (unless >>>> you take the royal road to pain and learn to program for the Win32 API >>>> and how it works for a particular Forth vendor), I'm looking at Racket >>>> Scheme. >> >> ____________________ >> Racket Users list: >> http://lists.racket-lang.org/users ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
