skirtcafe.org

FranTastic444 wrote: ↑Sat Apr 01, 2023 1:11 pm[...] we spoke about this when we met for a curry in Lexington (MA) what seems like many years ago. I still have a soft spot for MUMPS, which I last used professionally around 20 years ago.

I recall the day, the excellent food, and the wonderful company -- a shining example of what's possible.

I came away from that with my curiosity piqued about MUMPS and decided to sate it, located what looked like a decent book on the topic, and promptly devoured most of it. Once I got my head actually wrapped around some of the concepts, I had a renewed sense of pride in the achievements of our forefathers when it comes to outright creativity in solving problems. They produced a workable, pleasant, and functional was of doing things that nobody else had, and it stuck around for a long time indeed proving its worth to humanity.

Now, for me to really learn (as in master) something, I need a use-case for it so I can actually do real work using the tool-set, but nothing really occurred to me so it remained an intellectual exercise -- but a darned informative one!

It was great to meet up with you in person. We have since moved house a couple of times and haven't managed to find a curry house nearby that is anywhere near as good as the Royal India.

MUMPS tends to win out over other technologies when the data set is large and / or where a large number of records need to be updated as part of overnight / regular processing runs. I have used the language commercially in the financial services industry (many clients and accounts and then lots of transactions such as deals, dividends, corporate actions, banking transactions etc.) Every night our application would run through every bank account on the system (several hundred thousand of them) and then add daily notional interest to each account and then turning the notional interest into actual interest at the end of each month. This is the sort of thing that can be performed very quickly using the MUMPS $ORDER command to iterate through all of the accounts. Another commercial example is when I worked (briefly, fortunately) for a company that offered software for the shipping industry. Very large data sets are created when you get into the realms of creating manifests for containerized transportation / shipping and the analytics behind calculating profit / loss and working out what fees should be to transport containers indirectly between ports involves a lot of data and is well suited to being addressed using MUMPS.

The language is really in its element when it comes to medical records - it was written with this use case in mind. The MUMPS database that held all of the records for Vietnam vets (military, medical, pension) was for a while the largest database in the world (so I was told). Many hospitals and other medical facilities in the US and UK still use systems that are written in MUMPS.

If you wanted to build a database tracking the purchase of lottery tickets, I think that MUMPS would be ideally suited. ^TICKET(DrawDate, Sel1, Sel2, Sel3, Sel4, Sel5, MegaBall, Stack) = StoreID * DateTime of Purchase * TicketID This table would return winners for a given draw in a fraction of a second.

On a forum I frequented years ago, a member asked for a CSV that he could send to a printers to produce tickets for an event that included a unique code that could be typed in to a website after the event for a chance to win prizes. 80k codes were needed. Each code was to be 14-characters in length, unique (of course) and could not contain certain characters so that there wasn't an issue when typing in the code of getting mixed up between the letter O and the number 0 for example. Several of us had a go at putting some code together using a language of our choice. This particular task was well suited to MUMPS and nobody could get near the execution times that I was seeing (80k codes sub 1 second, 250k codes sub 4 seconds).

I've found a MUMPS emulator that runs in a browser here. Carl (or anyone else for that matter) - maybe you would like the challenge of writing some code to meet the above spec using this emulator I have coded it up in the emulator and I can share here (if anyone is even remotely interested).

The emulator is memory bound when it comes to screen output. I was able to create 80k records, but it will only allow me to display about 6k of them to the screen.

OK, the deed is done, completed this morning about 08:50 EDT.

Gripes about malfunctions go to me.

Everybody has been set back to the baseline defaults for style and language, but the languages look like they're installed and active, so you should be able to set them back again.

Thanks for the patience.

Thank you.

crfriend wrote: ↑Sun Apr 02, 2023 1:04 pm OK, the deed is done, completed this morning about 08:50 EDT.

Gripes about malfunctions go to me.

Everybody has been set back to the baseline defaults for style and language, but the languages look like they're installed and active, so you should be able to set them back again.

Thanks for the patience.

Thank you. It’s a thankless job and “someone has to do it” but not everyone does it well. So kudos to a job well done

No gripes here!
Job well done Carl, thank you.

Not noticed anything unusual so I guess it was successful. Having done a little system upgrading in a couple of my previous posts (HP mini - can’t remember the model, and VAX VMS) I appreciate the complexities. Grateful for all that you do, Carl, to keep us all in touch.

Steven

Great work Carl.

Seamless, thanks for the hard work.

Sometimes the hardest jobs are those that don't appear to change very much.

All is well here; just had to log-in to get everything back to normal.  The biggest compliment is when your work isn't noticed -- so thanks for all your work.

After some cursory testing here in my lab, I've gone ahead and installed the older-looking "Allan-SUBSILVER" style to the production site, so that can now be selected in the User Control Panel based on user preference.

If it doesn't look right, gripe at me. This was quite low on the priority list, the main one being the upgrade of a functionally-obsolete PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.0 to keep our esteemed Barista Emeritus from having to cough another five bucks per month to support obsolescent and riddled-with-security-holes version of the main interpreter.

The worst of the fires are, I believe, now out. The languages have been restored already, and now with the other major style that some folks were using I think this is finally "in the can". The SUBSILVER style wasn't designed with phpBB 3.3 (it dropped from support as of pgpBB 3.2.9), but seems to work.

It WORKS !



Thanks Carl

Uncle Al

Flawless update. If you hadn't posted about it, I would have had no idea...

crfriend wrote: ↑Mon Apr 03, 2023 6:56 pm After some cursory testing here in my lab, I've gone ahead and installed the older-looking "Allan-SUBSILVER" style to the production site, so that can now be selected in the User Control Panel based on user preference.

If it doesn't look right, gripe at me. This was quite low on the priority list, the main one being the upgrade of a functionally-obsolete PHP 7.4 to PHP 8.0 to keep our esteemed Barista Emeritus from having to cough another five bucks per month to support obsolescent and riddled-with-security-holes version of the main interpreter.

The worst of the fires are, I believe, now out. The languages have been restored already, and now with the other major style that some folks were using I think this is finally "in the can". The SUBSILVER style wasn't designed with phpBB 3.3 (it dropped from support as of pgpBB 3.2.9), but seems to work.

I had no idea you could change the style! Now I want to request a dark mode. I regularly read with the colors inverted in the evening to reduce eye strain and blue light, but whenever I'm looking at posted images I need to go back to the bright version to see the colors properly.

No rush, but if you have a prioritized list of stuff to improve around here, you are welcome to place this near the end...

Uncle Al wrote: ↑Mon Apr 03, 2023 8:43 pmIt WORKS !

Well, mostly... I've picked up a few discrepancies that I'll need to look at over the next few days.

Cool, thank you for the restore of "Allan-SUBSILVER", it was faster than I expected! Except the change style (since I'm not using the default one), I would not have noticed anything, that's what we can call a successfull update.
Regarding language, I remember I did not want to change from it and did it by error... after what I've been too lazy to revert