[koolba]

Neat stuff. For more esoteric environments that could use this type of automated leg up, check out MUMPS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUMPS

There's a bunch of mainly legacy hospital and government (primarily VA) systems that run on it. And where there's big government systems, there's big government dollars.

[sai18]

Thanks for sharing. It seems MUMPS is just as old and legacy as some of the COBOL systems!

[antonvs]

I was offered a MUMPS job in the 1980s. I took one look at the code and very quickly concluded that life was too short for that.

Later I got into programming language theory, and took another look at MUMPS from that perspective. As a programming language, it’s truly terrible in ways that languages like COBOL and FORTRAN are not. Just as one example, “local” variables have an indefinite lifetime and are accessible throughout a process, i.e. they’re not scoped to functions. But you can dynamically hide/shadow and delete them. It would be hard to design a less tractable way of managing variables if you tried.

MUMPS’ value proposition was how it handled persistent data as a built-in part of the language. In that sense it was a precursor to systems like dBASE, which were eventually supplanted by SQL databases. MUMPS was a pretty good persistent data management system coupled with a truly terrible programming language.