by fortuitous-frog 11 hours ago
For the curious, newer versions of MUMPS are still used as the core database framework by a lot of electronic health records companies. Most notably, it’s the backbone of Epic Systems, the largest EHR company in the US.
I interviewed at Epic in 2011. Got through a couple rounds - enough to see how weird and culty the place was.
I was alone in a room with one of my interviewers, who seemed pretty sharp. I asked him "do you like working here?"
He looked at me, glanced at the closed door, leaned forward and said in a low voice "nobody likes working here. If you have another option, take it."
I thanked him and left and I'm very glad I did.
That was very disappointing to read. We might be migrating from an old M system (Meditech Magic) to a new M system (Epic).
At least the front end is much more modern.
Do they really use MUMPS? Not something like ObjectScript?
I can’t speak for other companies, but I worked at Epic for a few years (left last year), and indeed MUMPS is still their bread and butter. In fact, I had not even heard about ObjectScript until reading this thread.
A few years ago, they _did_ develop a TypeScript wrapper framework (which was transpiled down into MUMPS). They heavily encouraged newer application code to use this, but it never caught on, was quietly abandoned after a bit.
Internally, MUMPS was often criticized or laughed at, but I doubt it’s going anywhere anytime soon.
Thanks for this interesting insight. Since they are apparently using Intersystems backends, I thought that ObjectScript might be a consequent choice; from my perspective it is rather comparable to JavaScript, so the TypeScript idea might have been stronger, but on the other hand might cause issues with (dynamically typed) globals.
Bad news! My medical co.uses EPIC! Scheissurger!