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

OK. It's been six months or more since I last updated this blog.

Astute readers will probably have realized that I've fallen out of the Cache world. My day-job is now working with Python and Django which, of course, makes me very happy.

But I have a bit of sadness too. I learned a LOT from working with Cache and ObjectScript. Some of it was painful. Some of it was weird. But much was enlightening. I often found myself realizing how different a programmer's world could be from that which I considered mainstream. I'm grateful that I had the chance to experience that. It made me a better (and humbler) programmer. Humbler because it doesn't matter how bad something looks, chances are it may have seemed, or even been, the right solution to some problem, somewhere, somewhen. Seeing that, teaches perspective.

Furthermore, I stand by the things I've written before. I still believe that both the theme of old-skool legacy medical systems coming to terms with the modern web 2.0 environment, and Intersystems' platform's potential for reinventing itself, are interesting.

I'd like to know more and follow both. OTOH, my new day-job and new set of concerns are taking up way too much time. If I could, I'd have attended the Slipstream Workshop this coming week, but as it's a work-day, I won't be able to. Good luck for everyone who's attending, anyway.

Finally, this is not goodbye. If any MUMPS related thoughts or news comes my way, I'll still pass them on. And if anyone else out there in the Cache or MUMPS communities would like to take over and continue this blog, I'd be happy to add you as a co-author. Just drop me a note in the comments here.

L8r peeps ...

PS : I'm extremely impressed with GitHub at the moment. So much so that I've decided that it's worth moving Twistah across to it from the rather unexciting Google Code. The new repository is http://github.com/interstar/Twistah/tree/master.