Re:The Mumps Programming Language
by jsgrahamus53 on Thursday March 16, 2017 @05:20PM
(#13889304)
I have no experience with Erlang, and about 30 years with MUMPS. Some MUMPS can be hard to read, and some is not.
Seems to me it's a matter of how well it was written and the experience of the reader.
Kind of like other languages.
Superficially, yes. They're both old and they both have ways of hooking machines together at a distance built right into the fabric of the language.
But that's where all analogies end. A MUMPS program tends to be an unreadable mess to anybody who hasn't touched it in the last 30 seconds, whereas Erlang is really quite readable (though there are many people bitching at the syntax, this usually means they haven't spent any time with the language). Erlang projects tend to exhibit extreme levels of reliability and fault tolerance (and fault resistance) whereas MUMPS installations tend to be houses of cards that come crashing down with the first breath of wind.
You could not - outside of superficial similarities - find two architectures so diametrically opposed as MUMPS and Erlang.