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.

The anti-MUMPS troll at the Daily WTF? (admittedly, we've all been there) has another anti-MUMPS story.

If you've been following the discussion over Mumps : the IT world's best kept secret? you'll have noticed that one thing that stands out about Caché / MUMPS is its unusually structured data-store of persistent, multi-dimensional ragged-arrays. And Rob Tweed makes a case that this is a better fit than a relational database for internet scale applications. He cites Google's BigTable and Amazon's S3 as examples of a trend away from relational dbs in favour of key value pairs.

Today Steve Yegge has an interesting meditation on a similar theme, about "domain modelling schools" and the need for programmers to have experience of multiple tools and organizing principles. (And while he doesn't note the MUMPS model, it would be another interesting one to add to the list.)

Worth reading, also, this Cringely piece on how relational databases don't work so well in a parallel cloud where disk-access is often a bottleneck so more of the live database is moved into memory. (Killer quote : "Google has THE ENTIRE INTERNET IN MEMORY AT ONCE.") Disk is just used for backup / persistence."

More discussion of Rob's future of Mumps is going on on the mailing list and in comments to his original post.