For the curious, newer versions of MUMPS are still used as the core database framework by a lot of electronic health records companies. Most notably, it’s the backbone of Epic Systems, the largest EHR company in the US.

It’s always useful to look at prior art and review capabilities we might have missed. Innovation can happen by mixing the “good parts” of different old ideas.

MUMPS’ bad reputation is totally unearned. Most examples online (the wiki page, the awful Case of the MUMPS article) are examples of MUMPS code from the 60s-70s when storage was a premium and enterprise-size programs had to fit in a handful of megabytes, so there was no room for readability.

MUMPS code is more readable than most languages, it’s very simple and procedural. And the ability to interact directly with durable data the same as you do local data is very nice. I don’t know why no modern languages try to do something similar.

I did most of Advent of Code last year code golfing in MUMPS (running on Caché), with the additional challenge on up to and including day 7 doing without literals - that's to say no numbers and no strings. It was good fun - https://github.com/dominique-m-aoc/aoc-2025/blob/main/day03p... for day three part 1 for example. Or day 7 part 2 where the alphanumeric chars spell a story with only two nonsense words, with almost all the chars being on their own: https://github.com/dominique-m-aoc/aoc-2025/blob/main/day07p... It is a neat language but even more so a neat overall system and bag of concepts that I feel annoyed we haven't seen more of...

Built-in hierarchical DB? Neat!

DB access using same syntax as local variables? Neat!

Datetime epoch in 1841? Ok, sure.

Stringly typed with literally no other types? Uh…

Appendix 7 on this page http://www.faqs.org/faqs/m-technology-faq/part2/ : runs screaming into the night

It had some neat ideas, some alright ideas that were reasonable in the context it was created for, and some absolute nightmare fuel.

I’ve been working on a project to celebrate the anniversary of MUMPS and its first standard.

For those unfamiliar, MUMPS is an imperative language famously born at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1966. Its defining characteristic is that the language and the database are deeply integrated, acting as an early NoSQL database decades before the term existed.

See here for more information about the project: https://github.com/rochus-keller/mumps/

There are pre-compiled versions of my MUMPS 76 interpreter in case you want to play with it.

obligatory reference: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/a_case_of_the_mumps

Did they really have to use KILL as the word to delete a variable? Especially as it's used in hospitals? KILL patient....?