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Comment by z3ugma | Hacker News Reader

>>The VA is a prime example of antiquated government computing; its main systems run on a 1960s vintage system called MUMPS, a dead digital language that few people under retirement age know how to use.

This is simply untrue. This language is now called 'M', and has been standardized as recently as 2005. All of TD Ameritrade's trades are processed on an M database.

M was doing NoSQL, web-scale computing on commodity hardware before many of us were even born. It can integrate with NodeJS (http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/465).

Look into Rob Tweed's ongoing work with M (http://gradvs1.mgateway.com/download/mumps-acceptable.pdf) http://www.mgateway.com/docs/universalNoSQL.pdf http://robtweed.wordpress.com/

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Just because it's still being maintained does NOT mean it's not antiquated and does NOT mean it's a good use of taxpayer money.

Just because its old tech doesn't mean its bad either - when one very large employer I used to work with turned off its old in house payroll system written in COBOL the second month of the new brought in system was a disaster 70% or so of the staff didn't get paid :-)

I cant say more as I was sworn to secrecy but lets say some very stupid contract operators had a large part to play

You don't think it is possible that in the 30 years since the original system was written, things have become a little inane?

??inane?? WTF are you smoking mate

PARIS the in house system was updated for 20+ years quite successfully never missing a run.

And you do know that for serious HPC a lot of work Is still done in the venerable Fortran (look at job adverts for CERN) and yes people use Python for some of that now as well but the Libraries that do the heavy lifting are Fortran ones.

It's the 20+ years of changes that cause the issue, not the original spec.

So? and your point is? The inhouse system was modified and worked fine it was the brand new brought in system that failed.

Sure, but COBOL is also a huge maintenance cost compared to something written in, say, java, which has no end of somewhat versed developers.

That rather depends on how competent those "no end of developers" are. From my experience of Perl+Ruby developers, I'd be amazed if even 1% of Java developers were good enough to migrate an existing system without catastrophic results. And those 1% are a) hard to find, b) very expensive and c) likely already tied up and hoarded like gold-egg laying geese.

Yes if your one of the worlds largest users of IBM mainframes as this company is finding good Cobol programmers is not going to be hard.

I used MUMPS at my last job, I'd say antiquated is the perfect word for it.

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