Talk:MUMPS

message: I have experience with a mumps database and mumps programmers. I think it is funny that a article about mumps can have a "pros" paragraph it is clearly more effective end efficient to just start over and use a relational database and put your mumps database in a museum. You wil get a more logical and understanable database. You can use a real modern structured or objectorientated programming language so you get a lot better code.
*Not everyone with experience in both relational databases and with MUMPS agrees with you. (Could I hazard a guess that you learned about relational technology in school, and then unwillingly landed in a situation where you had to deal with an existing MUMPS-based system?) Dpbsmith (talk) 15:30, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mumps in the modern world 

message: "Because it predates C, BASIC and most other popular languages in current usage, it has very different syntax and terminology." Actually, BASIC came out in the early '60s while the article says MUMPS came out in the late '60s, so BASIC predates MUMPS, not vice versa. It's certainly possible that BASIC wasn't very widely known yet when MUMPS was developed, but that's not the same thing. -- CWesling 03:42, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Predates BASIC? Not ''that'' old 

message: Someone tagged this to be merged elsewhere.  Cute.  No discussion and suggested the wrong direction.  Rolled back.  --Connel MacKenzie -  wikt 20:29, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Did I tag it the wrong direction? OK, maybe I did, couldn't you have fixed that instead? --Regebro 20:41, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed merge suggestion 

message: Comment unecassary, really. The MUMPS (criticism) is a POV hate-article with no counter, and bad arguments. The good arguments (if any) should be merged into this article. --Regebro 20:45, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Readded merge suggestion 

message: Although it's hard to find in the disorganized 'Talk' page, you can see that the 'MUMPS (Criticism)' section started out being part of the article.  It started somewhat small (each heading was just a bullet point) and then grew into a giant section as people raised various objections.  Then it was forked off into its own page.  Then the main MUMPS article was revised and a paragraph representing all the major criticisms from the page was added to the main page in the 'Opinion' section.
I don't know how to delete the 'MUMPS (Criticism)' page, but you can see what became of the content on it:
  Old Page (with full criticism)
  Page after merge
I personally don't think the main article needs more expanded criticism.  Most people using MUMPS have no choice but to continue using it, and most people starting new database applications don't need a wikipedia article to help them rule it out.
Saintly 02:48, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that any merging needed has already been accomplished, and that MUMPS (criticism) serves no purpose now and should be deleted.  I think here on Wikipedia that is accomplished with  or ?  --Connel MacKenzie -  wikt 03:22, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

text: Asking on IRC, I was told to blank it and replace it with a redirect (such as #REDIRECT MUMPS#Opinion) with an edit summary comment pointing here.  --Connel MacKenzie -  wikt 03:27, 31 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Vote to remove 'Merge' suggestion, and delete 'MUMPS (Criticism)' article 

message: *Removed merge link
*Replaced criticism page with a redirect
*The 'overview' was a bit convoluted in places, I tried to separate some dense topics and provide examples.  
*Removed some vague language (MUMPS was based on 'advanced structures'. -- perhaps someone can say what these were or why they're so advanced.  Do they use Ninjas?) and how it is 'quite efficient' in lots of areas (again, does it use Ninjas?  Perhaps a link to an efficiency study of MUMPS vs. Oracle, or someone explaining why having dense, abbreviated source code is important today?)
*Linkified some stuff (Interpreted, compiled, etc..)
*Banished terrible code example 'hellohtml()' to its own section called 'sample program'.  Perhaps someone can come up with a better sample program?  The functions in that program all print stuff directly rather than returning it (limiting their usefulness and demonstrating that you often CAN'T do things you'd like in MUMPS thanks to string-length limitations).  Anyway, 'Hello World' is just where you show off the simplest (readable) program possible, like on the article pages for other languages.
Saintly 21:01, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Replaced MUMPS (Criticism) page with redirect to Opinion section 

message: I've removed some of the external links. Others remain as references. I'm leaving those in hopes some eone familiar with this page can look at them and move them to the reference section where appropriate.  Cheers, :) Dlohcierekim  22:38, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Many external links in article.  

message: The following text was removed from the article for POV and for inaccuracy. The cited report is not about the deficience of any programming language but rather about administrative and personal failures, combined perhaps with physical security issues. There may be such a report excoriating MUMPS for the reasons claimed, but this is not it. 
:The proprietary, unstructured, otiose, and primitive nature of MUMPS has caused the Veteran's Administration to delay care to military veterans and made auditing of its responsiveness unnecessarily difficult. Cf.http://www.va.gov/oig/51/FY2007rpts/VAOIG-07-01083-157.pdf, an August 2007 report which found serious problems in both areas, where data systems perform a critical role.
Comments anyone? ww 18:12, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Go, ww! 8-) -- CWesling 09:44, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Ummm, that report dealt with the physical loss of a hard drive with data on it. You are blaming that on MUMPS? Perspectoff (talk) 18:47, 17 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: removal of contentious POV text

message: "Because it predates C and most other popular languages in current usage, it has very different syntax and terminology. "  It doesn't follow.  Accepting that M predates C, it would be at least as sensible to say that although C followed M/Mumps, very different syntax and terminology were chosen for C by its designers.  It would not be senible to say that this was becuase C followed M, I'd assume that the designers made choices that seemed good to them, for their own reasons.  I'd suggest that the sentence is either discarded, or is altered to something similar to: 
"Mumps predates C "  (in case anyone can't decide form the dates given for the start of the two, which came first) 
"The syntax of M is very different from C".  (in case anyone can't tell that from looking at the syntaxes. 
Actually, it would be best left out, would it not?   Midgley (talk) 23:06, 30 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, probably not. MUMPS is a little known language and this comment relates some aspects of it to a much better known language. In the process explaining, for non-MUMPS heads, that its differences are not an aberration in an era of block structured languages (and so aberrational in a bad way), but arise from the history and so look of perfectly plausible reasons. Reading this comment as a logical cause and effect is misplaced. But if you can word it in such as way as to not misled logically while making the same points on behalf of the Gentle Reader, please be bold. ww (talk) 00:58, 31 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cause following effect? 

message: It seems regrettable that the article does not contain an example of good, straightforward, intelligible MUMPS coding practice. The FILEMAN example is a fair representative of what might be called "old-school" coding style; the others border on tricks or intentional obfuscation. 
I've personally been away from MUMPS for too long to have an example to supply. Dpbsmith (talk) 23:03, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sample code 

message: When your article is less informative than the DailyWTF article on the same topic, you know you're doing it wrong.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.38.97.175 (talk) 16:16, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Nope. See the (exhaustive) debate in this talk page and MUMPS/Archive01, for why people decided criticism of MUMPS didn't belong here. It'd be nice if the page linked to that post though, since a DailyWTF post about a language is pretty notable, but I'm having trouble thinking of a way to do it neutrally. Publicly Visible (talk) 18:27, 7 July 2014 (UTC)

text: OK, I added a link to The Daily WTF. And, well, made a new Criticism section. But don't panic! I put it as a subheading under "Summary of key language features" and didn't actually include any of the criticisms, which is hopefully more WP:NPOV. Someone said above that The Daily WTF isn't WP:RS but I think it falls under a source that's biased but still important enough to be worth including. I think as long as we stick with things like "The Daily WTF wrote about it" as opposed to "The Daily WTF wrote about it and that means it's bad" we'll be fine. Publicly Visible (talk) 19:25, 7 July 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Looks like it has been Orwell'd, there is currently no mention of the daily WTF in the article.Medinoc (talk) 10:00, 14 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Here is a better article on MUMPS 

message: I am not a MUMPS programmer, but I revised the $PIECE example.
In particular, I moved this in front of the PIECE example that uses SET.
   $PIECE("world.std.com",".",2) yields "std".
The example has no dependency on the SET X portion which had preceded it. This MUMPS code seems to be equivalent to the following AWK example: 
echo 'world.std.com' | awk 'BEGIN{FS="."};{print $2}'
yielding
std
The example MUMPS code that follows:
SET X="dpbsmith@world.std.com"
SET $P(X,"@",1)="office" causes X to become "office@world.std.com"
seems to be equivalent to the following AWK code.
echo 'dpsmith@world.std.com' | awk 'BEGIN{FS="@";OFS=FS};{$1="office";print}'
which yields:
office@world.std.com
Lent (talk) 21:49, 17 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  $PIECE Example in "Summary of key language features" restructured 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: This article should have a criticism section for completeness and usability. The lack of criticism about MUMPS makes this article appear opinionated and non-objective. This is of particular importance for non-technical readers. The DailyWTF article previously referenced in the talk section is perhaps biased.
Other important programming language articles such as the one on C++ and JAVA have criticism sections.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 104.34.69.100 (talk) 18:47, 20 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Criticism section needed 

message: Removed the reference to MUMPS at Partners and MGH since it was in the "Health IT Company" paragraph, and neither are Healthcare IT companies. If Partners is a significant user of MUMPS outside their 2015 to 2017 Epic EHR implementation that would belong in a "MUMPS Users" section.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 104.34.69.100 (talk) 18:53, 20 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  MUMPS at MGH and Partners? 

message: I am wary of conflict of Interest issues, but this page says that CCSM stood for Computer Consultants Standard MUMPS.  As I worked for a company that used CCSM, I can testify that the acronym stood for Comp Consultants Standard MUMPS.   Should I change it, or can I refer to http://www.mumpster.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=62  and 
https://books.google.com/books?id=mt0cw1-3PIkC&pg=RA1-PA123&lpg=RA1-PA123&dq="CCSM"+"Comp+Consultants"&source=bl&ots=bI-dZam_uL&sig=ACfU3U1Dg2yW97vv0h5Gc7YkDNyLMuJvqg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwje-fLx8szoAhXylOAKHYPvBI0Q6AEwAXoECAsQKQ#v=onepage&q="CCSM"%20"Comp%20Consultants"&f=false 
to support my claim and have someone else fix it ?  DaveJWhitten (talk) 18:36, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fix to CCSM 

message: Has anyone thought about transcluding this page into the MUMPS page so it could be available to the interested reader but not bulking up the page when editing ?
Is there any Wikipedia Policy which might be relevant to doing this ?
I will follow the steps listed on my (talk page to allow anyone to object re my conflict of interest.
The date of this note is the base date for my approach mentioned there.
16:29, 9 August 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Transclusion of [[MUMPS syntax]] into MUMPS page ? 

message: The section on language features states "Declarations: None. All variables are dynamically created at the first time a value is assigned." But the Criticisms section refers to local variable declarations. Which is it? 
Ross Fraser (talk) 01:55, 16 February 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Variable Declarations or Not? 

message: The discussion pertaining to how local variables are scope makes circumlocutional reference to this. For Static Scoping variables in a routine, that are not defined therein, refer to global variables. For Dynamic Scoping, they refer to the locals of whatever routine called that routine, if any, or else to globals. Dynamic Scoping is not, in any way, idiosyncratic to MUMPS. LISP also had it (and some dialects still do). So does bash, perl (optionally), as well as the POSIX/UNIX language bc.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.29.226.169 (talk) 18:36, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Variable scoping: it's called 'Dynamic Scoping'