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Comment by JustARandomGuy | Hacker News Reader

Do you have any recommendations for books/learning materials/websites for people who want to learn MUMPs?

I'd recommend the documentation that Intersystems Caché ships with - which is accessible on http://docs.intersystems.com/

It's not traditional MUMPS, but it adds things like macros, error handling, sane variable scope, regular expressions and so on.

http://docs.intersystems.com/cache20131/csp/docbook/DocBook....

Would you actually recommend anyone learn MUMPS for any reason besides job reasons?

I wouldn't. It's not a terrible language to work with on the job, but I don't think I've gotten anything out of it in the same way that I did from learning OCaml or Lisp.

Ditto, there's not a whole lot of innovation of ideas in MUMPS at all. It's just a random programming language that's good enough to get things done with and the database that's next to it is nicer than most and supports both NoSQL and SQL. Spend the time on learning Python, JavaScript and SQL I'd say :P

For a modern view on Mumps as a database technology and the future (or not) of its language, see my blog at http://robtweed.wordpress.com

Also see: http://www.mgateway.com/docs/universalNoSQL.pdf

I've worked with this ... MUMPS is a dead language. Cache is a proprietary implementation of mumps that costs big bucks; cache is interpreted and pretty slow compared to any other language since 1989.

I wouldn't bother.

I think the most relevant bit is that it's much cheaper than Oracle. And I've seen Caché do quite complex things quite quickly, like with all database systems it's up to your indices more than anything else.

The entire VA (VistA) and the DOD (AHLTA, CHCS) systems are still implemented in Mumps and will be for the foreseeable future, far from a dead language

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