Born Again

This week i was introduced to the world of MUMPS. No it is not the epidemic that hit you when you were young (Painful swelling of the salivary glands caused by viral disease) a.k.a Abu Dhgaim. Rather it is MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System), or alternatively M, is a programming language created in the late 1960s, originally for use in the healthcare industry. Since i spent almost every day of may career life working, reading, training and practicing Oracle and Oracle derivatives software and services, I became so overwhelmed by ORACLE to an extent that i feel that the world evolves around it. Well, and obviously, there is a lot more going around the world. There are communities, project, mission critical applications developed by the MUMPS language over MUMPS database. Such application are both in health and financial sectors. As of today, there are numerous sites that are running mumps. For example Bank of England and Barclays Bank, also it is used by Ameritrade, the largest online trading service in the US with over 12 billion transactions per day.

I know of no installation in Jordan, but something seems to be coming soon as there is a Jordanian tender calling for HIMS package called Vista (MUMPS based) http://www.rss2go.net/topic/national_healthcare (Bad news for local HIMS companies)
I came to know about MUMPS when a customer is Saudi Arabia was asking us if we can build a Data Warehouse solution for a health care system which is running MUMPS! my initial feedback was SAY WHAT? I know about a lot of things in this domain, but not this one. In the World of vista i am only three days old. I downloaded the product on Linux, built a database, and ran the Hello world example. If we take the project, i guess, my i will extend my MUMPS life and may even celebrate MUMPS birthdays, if not, my MUMPS life might as well just nostalgically evade