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Comment by skue | Hacker News Reader

Everything you so aptly described also applies to the healthcare industry, which is mired in a language from the 60s (MUMPS).

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Here in Finland (population 5 million) the government is preparing to allocate ca. 1500 million euros to order a country-wide medical patient database from Accenture, who are the local representative for Epic Systems [1] and Epic's MUMPS-based [2] medical information systems.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Systems

[2] http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS.aspx

My apologies. I live in the area where Epic is based. They tend to hire straight out of college and work their employees into the ground. It's a weird subculture over there, but they're swimming in money for all the government kickbacks hospitals get for implementing electronic medical records here in the States. http://www.cms.gov/Regulations-and-Guidance/Legislation/EHRI...

Absolutely. Ironically, the last time I encountered the MUMPS language, I was also dealing with a whack of COBOL systems.

Don't forget about Caché Intersystems, who provide a "modern object-oriented" MUMPS implementation. Complete with SQL emulation and a web template language that's almost a direct lift of ColdFusion(down to needing Dreamweaver to edit files stored inside the DB).

I interact with another team almost daily that has to support that. They do their job pretty well, but I really wished we simply had something like MongoDB to store some data in for a recent, rather trivial, project.

It's indeed a complicated, convoluted, growth.

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