Can A Phoenix Arise From The Ashes Of Mumps? (Part 2)

Ask a Mumps devotee to explain what he/she believes is its magic ingredient and you’ll get one or more of the following being highlighted:

• the easy-going interpreted language and its loosely-typed nature, which allows for rapid development
• the database which uses a concept and model known as Global Storage.  This storage model and its impressive flexibility is described in detail in the “Universal NoSQL” paper that I co-wrote with George James.
• the fact that the language and database are tightly-coupled.  Mumps is neither a language nor a database, but a combination of the two.

My analysis in part 1 of this article suggests that the rest of the IT industry have never recognised anything particularly special or noteworthy about these characteristics which I think is our (the Mumps community’s) fault, not their’s. Let’s examine each of the three key magic ingredients of Mumps in a bit more detail...