[fortuitous-frog]

For the curious, newer versions of MUMPS are still used as the core database framework by a lot of electronic health records companies. Most notably, it’s the backbone of Epic Systems, the largest EHR company in the US.

[dmd]

I interviewed at Epic in 2011. Got through a couple rounds - enough to see how weird and culty the place was.

I was alone in a room with one of my interviewers, who seemed pretty sharp. I asked him "do you like working here?"

He looked at me, glanced at the closed door, leaned forward and said in a low voice "nobody likes working here. If you have another option, take it."

I thanked him and left and I'm very glad I did.

[p_l]

It has also a presence in the financial world (under brand name "InterSystems Caché"), though mainly as no-sql database until Java and other foreign wrappers stop being enough, and suddenly you're writing stored procedures (or at least their equivalent) in MUMPS

[NetMageSCW]

That was very disappointing to read. We might be migrating from an old M system (Meditech Magic) to a new M system (Epic).

At least the front end is much more modern.

[Rochus]

Do they really use MUMPS? Not something like ObjectScript?

[fortuitous-frog]

I can’t speak for other companies, but I worked at Epic for a few years (left last year), and indeed MUMPS is still their bread and butter. In fact, I had not even heard about ObjectScript until reading this thread.

A few years ago, they _did_ develop a TypeScript wrapper framework (which was transpiled down into MUMPS). They heavily encouraged newer application code to use this, but it never caught on, was quietly abandoned after a bit.

Internally, MUMPS was often criticized or laughed at, but I doubt it’s going anywhere anytime soon.

[Rochus]

Thanks for this interesting insight. Since they are apparently using Intersystems backends, I thought that ObjectScript might be a consequent choice; from my perspective it is rather comparable to JavaScript, so the TypeScript idea might have been stronger, but on the other hand might cause issues with (dynamically typed) globals.

[giardini]

Bad news! My medical co.uses EPIC! Scheissurger!