by kstrauser 11 hours ago
Built-in hierarchical DB? Neat!
DB access using same syntax as local variables? Neat!
Datetime epoch in 1841? Ok, sure.
Stringly typed with literally no other types? Uh…
Appendix 7 on this page http://www.faqs.org/faqs/m-technology-faq/part2/ : runs screaming into the night
It had some neat ideas, some alright ideas that were reasonable in the context it was created for, and some absolute nightmare fuel.
Strange it feels worse than both raw asm and apl.
Quite agree.
Some very novel ideas for the time. I’m not a PL historian but can’t think of an earlier language with such a complex runtime to support it.
But, woof - no thanks to the stringly typing. The article under discussion treats this as a positive, saying it eliminates conversion and having to worry about it. I don’t believe that’s possible, and would bet my life savings that MUMPS interpreting a string as a number when the programmer didn’t intend it, or vice-versa, is a reasonably common class of bugs in MUMPS programs.
The tutorial seems really good, but I’m frustrated with parts like that (or the explanation on a lack of operator precedence) which try to frame a bad thing as a good thing.
In this sense it reads like the autobiography of a presidential candidate; written in a calculated way to minimize flaws.
My intention was to present the MUMPS 76 standard so it can be appreciated by today's software engineers; it should be obvious that this is a historical treatise, not a guide for today's systems; as mentioned elsewhere, MUMPS 76 was designed to work on PDP machines with 8K to 24K of core memory. Your coercion concerns apply to any dynamically/weakly typed language, and the same coercion-class bugs are rampant in JavaScript, Perl, PHP, and shell scripting, all of which survived and thrived. MUMPS made deliberate simplicity trade-offs to be usable in 4K of memory in the 1960s. Many early languages made the same choice. And I appreciate that you regard me as presidential candidate.
Already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707444
I don’t think that’s the same discussion.