I'm still sparring with Rob Tweed over MUMPS's dynamic scoping.

The Mumps scope conversation is hotting up (see Rob's answer and comments). And he leads me to a new MUMPS blog.

I just answered a question about MUMPS on programmers.stackexchange.com

Having been out of that world for a couple of years, my thinking is that the NoSQL movement is probably the best and worst thing to happen to MUMPS. Ultimately it's likely to both vindicate and kill it. Because somebody, at some point, is going to reinvent MUMPS's database and query structure almost identically, but with no connection to the MUMPS tradition. Then people will rave about this new storage system. But no-one will ever choose a MUMPS derivative again.

For example, a month or two ago, I was talking with a colleague about using redis to cache a look-up of something in our Django application. We had a large number of records addressed by a triple of three keys, and needed to quickly get subsets matching one or two of these keys (but different combinations at different times).

This is the kind of thing that MUMPS eats for breakfast. But we were finding it hard to squash into redis's key,val pair structure. Even with dictionaries. (Same would be true of memcached etc.) For the first time in my life, I found myself actually regretting that I couldn't write this module in Cache ObjectScript.

Dell Streak tablets part of their health-care strategy.

Andy Oram at O'Reilly on VistA.

I wouldn't dare guess whether VistA will continue as a niche product or will suddenly emerge to eat up the U.S. market for electronic medical systems. But I think it's definitely something to watch.

Philip Greenspun's suggestions for reform of the US Health system.

Here come the healthcare apps.

Tim O'Reilly on open patient record initiatives