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by vincent-manis 250 days ago
No, MUMPS (or M) is a remote descendant of JOSS, an interactive language of the 1950s. JOSS has all sorts of variants (DEC's FOCAL language of the 1960s was a dialect), but I think MUMPS is the only living one. MUMPS code is mostly unreadable, as the commands can be, and often are, abbreviated to the first letter. As a result, it looks a lot like line noise.

Regardless of its many warts, Cobol cannot be accused of being unreadable. Verbose, yes.
2 comments
nradov 250 days ago
MUMPS was originally developed in the 1960s for use on minicomputers that had maybe 64KB RAM. At the time it was a lot more important to keep code size small, hence the single letter commands. Readability wasn't a concern then but it sure looks like a mess today.
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vintermann 248 days ago
It's hard to imagine it's an improvement over just the raw assembly.
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nradov 247 days ago
Imagine harder. It was an enormous improvement over assembly language. Not so much for the basic coding but for the portability and built-in persistent data structures. MUMPS has an excellent "NoSQL" database built in which is a pretty good fit for a lot of healthcare use cases.
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cyberax 249 days ago
> Regardless of its many warts, Cobol cannot be accused of being unreadable. Verbose, yes.

Hence the "evil twin" comment :)

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