Comment by nwhatt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nwhatt | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Epic developer here.

MUMPS is older than SQL, so preSQL might be more appropriate than NoSQL.

There were moments of joy programming M, and the performance, scalability, and HA aspects of the Intersystems implementation don't hurt Epic one bit in the sales process.

At Epic, there are so many abstractions away from M that you might start to think you're working in another language. You never set globals in production code, instead using Epic's homegrown ORM to define schemas for your data.

At the end of the day, lack of first order functions and any other data structure other than the B-tree array makes for fun problem solving, but not necessarily clean and concise code.

It's funny, this is the first I've heard of Chronicles being called an ORM. I wouldn't really hesitate to call it a full database itself, written in M. But now that I think about it, I think you're quite on point there.

(You're telling me though you never came across "end-user" API-level code that was directly digging around in ^ER, ^ER1? Hahah)

Yeah smart people work at Epic, and smart people with ties to the midwest end up staying longer than 5-6 years. Epic does get a lot of things right, especially the code review process. If someone saw a reference to ^ER in code being committed, you can bet that it would get changed. The linter (HXPARSE) would actually prevent you from moving code with certain global references.

really? I think that depends on where you're at in the company. many touch M code on the daily, and while you don't set globals directly, I think ORM is generous for any of the systems that I know you are describing

Really? Did you ever create a new master file? Even an item? There are literally a million lifecycle hooks and item metadata properties available.

If Chronicles was open sourced tomorrow, it probably wouldn't make the front page of HN, but it is extremely feature rich tool that fits perfectly into the Epic ecosystem. That's true of most things that Epic develops.

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