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by webjprgm 3889 days ago
I would argue that it isn't about how old the technology is but how good the developer tools and support are. Newer technologies (not brand new, ones that have a few years of maturity) often have better support in common developer platforms, more tutorials and answers on StackOverflow, etc. They are also easier to find employees to hire who know how to use them (or who WANT to use them).

If an older technology is so great then my preference would be to build modern tools for that old technology and then it would be like new. If you can evangelize this old-made-new platform a bit then you could find more people willing to use and learn it, which would fix the online presence and employee hiring problems too.

Note that MUMPS is one of those old technologies used in healthcare. It is basically a NoSQL database from before NoSQL was popular. Intersystems' website suggests that they've made a bunch of additions to it, but Intersystems charges a lot of money. GT.M is the open source one but as far as I know it sticks more to the ANSI M standard. That standard language is pretty old so it can get confusing to read/write it. I'm not sure if GT.M provides dev tools either. Intersystems does, but AFAIK they are not as good as tools like Visual Studio, XCode, or other newer platforms.
2 comments
cordite 3888 days ago
The way I see MUMPS or M (because clinicians don't like hearing that word) is a string typed almost-assembly level server scripting language.

GTM does stick to the ANSI M standard with a few extensions for basic escape holes like calling a UNIX process or writing to a file. It doesn't have the same level of optimization, reliability, recoverability, etc. that intersystems sells.

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ethbro 3888 days ago
Non-snarky point, but every new technology is destined to become the next old technology.

And the future will reveal that some choices of the technology in question showed incredible foresight and some were very poorly conceived.

If we're lucky, the good choices match well with certain problem domains and the poor choices are an acceptable price to pay.

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