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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (379802)	4/22/2008 7:58:54 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578452

"Neither is there an excuse for writing a new application in MUMPS." That is the point. It isn't a new application. It has been developed over decades. At the time they started the project, MUMPS was a pretty good choice. As I pointed out, at the time there was only one other real choice. Sure, they could have picked c, but the hot language of the time was Pascal. c++ wasn't even a wet dream. Can you imagine if they had chosen Pascal? For one, the project never would have gotten off the ground. It just isn't possible to write an application like VistA in Pascal unless they had used a non-standard variant like Turbo Pascal. And, given the fact it has been around so long, it is pretty much bug free. Which is something you can't say about most non-trivial applications. "but if you think the only difference between MUMPS and Java or C++ or C# is fashion" It depends. You use the right tool for the application. You don't do like the French did in the 1980s when they tried to rewrite unix in Pascal. "you're [once again] talking out of your league" When it comes to programming, you aren't even close to my league. Languages come and go. So do programming techniques. Extreme programming and its spinoffs is the hot topic of the day. And, there are some good ideas there. What is interesting is the way that languages are no longer just languages any more. Bjorn Stroustrup likes to lecture on that particular topic.