Rochus

Isn't there a pattern jokingly called "Nobel disease"? I remember that it refers to cases where a laureate’s justified authority in one narrow achievement becomes overconfidence in unrelated science, medicine, politics, or philosophy. I did a PhD with a Nobel laureate and was able to observe this up close.

This is about the MUMPS 1976 standard. I'm not aware of any jobs where this is required. It's purely interesting for historical reasons. The article is part of my anniversary project (https://github.com/rochus-keller/MUMPS/). I neither think that "your career will suffer" if you do Ada, Fortran, Mumps (i.e. M/Cache/IRIS or GT.M/YottaDB), RPG or Cobol projects. Specialists are well paid, particularly with mainframe and domain experience.

I have never touched Claude Code and don't have any plans to use it. This is about the history of MUMPS. No reason to dwell on this if you're not interested in the topic (and even less reason to complain about it).

Interesting documentary; nice to see all the people involved; Simula is not mentioned in the documentary, though in an earlier lecture, Gosling was very specific that Java implemented the object model of Simula 67, which he had used before (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccRtIdlTqlU&t=2444s).

This is an argument that, for an independent "middle-class" musician, giving recordings away in return for direct fan contact can be economically superior to selling individual downloads. Fully agree. I started to do so more than twenty years ago: https://rochus-keller.ch/?cat=3. I went even a step further in that I'm not even associated with a collecting-society (SUISA here in Switzerland), but permit everyone including radio stations or vloggers to play my music for free; the very little copyright royalties is much less than the publicity effect.

Unbelievable. I guess because of a lot of bored software people rather than trained musicians.

Yes. If we assume only 5-10% of musicians with a decent, self-supporting living from composing/playing/performing alone (most others work somewhere in the “music-sector”, e.g. as teacher or as clerc of a record label or collecting society), only 0.5–2.5% have a stable middle-class income from artistic music alone, and roughly 0.01–0.3% have a upper-class income from artistic music alone and can afford to spend 11k£ for such a synthesizer.

but I'm glad they exist for professional musicians to use

The irony is that a professional musician in most cases has less budget to buy those expensive things than someone working e.g. as a teacher or clerc.

Nice, but I guess it's pretty expensive.

Alan Kay‘s group at Xerox PARC built Smalltalk and the machine it lived on, the Alto. Everyone knows what we took from PARC: the mouse, the windows, the bitmapped display, the desktop metaphor.

Not quite. Kay’s group built Smalltalk and used Alto machines, but the Alto was a Computer Science Laboratory project (not Kay's group): Butler Lampson and Charles Thacker designed the Alto as a personal distributed-computing system. Lampson, with Robert Taylor and Charles Thacker, were even receipients of the ACM Software System Award for conceiving and guiding the Alto system. Engelbart’s SRI group demonstrated a mouse, windows, collaborative document work, and more already in 1968. PARC itself supported multiple, substantially different programming environments: Smalltalk, Cedar/Mesa, and Interlisp, rather than representing a single uniform “Alto idea.”

That's a cool application. Was fun playing around.

That's cool. Did you compare performance with the PUC Lua VM versions (which are register based as well)? Personally, I find the Are-we-fast-yet suite very useful and usually migrate the suite to my languages to compare the implementations (see e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/are-we-fast-yet/).

Fascinating. Is there a "preview" anywhere?

Sounds like English film and television series music from the seventies (e.g. "All Creatures Great and Small"). It's nice and surprising (in that Suno was able to create it). But not "more beautiful than any song I have ever heard in my life, ever" ;-)

Lisp made the compiler’s internal tree representation directly writable by programmers. That is powerful, but it is not the same as giving programmers the best notation for expressing and maintaining large systems.

The tiny self-interpreter is a fine pedagogical artifact, but calling it software’s Maxwell equations oversells it. S-expressions are a convenient printable AST: lists whose meaning is supplied largely by the head symbol and argument positions. Excellent for macros and language experimentation; not necessarily a good human-level notation for large programs. A decent surface syntax provides useful "molecular" structure rather than exposing the "atoms".

previous post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48833164

That's a really cool project. Alex already managed to compile the Lisa sources published by the CHM in 2025 using the original Lisa tools run on Ray Arachelian's emulator (see https://github.com/alexthecat123/LisaSourceCompilation).

There seem to be a growing number of Rust based microkernel systems (Redox, Robigalia, Tock, Xous, etc.). Anyone knows what's the core benefit of LiberSystem in comparison? The contact address is funny:

LiberSoft

Liberty Street 1

Liberty City

LL-00001 Liberland

ID: LLC230002

I wouldn't worry about that. Tiobe simply measures how many search queries are made for some terms supposed to represent a programming language, and even that process is still inaccurate (e.g. because of ambiguity with other uses of the same terms). The result says nothing about how widely the language in question is actually used. There is no reason to assume a correlation between effective prevalence and the number of searches. Experienced developers are unlikely to enter the terms used by Tiobe into a search engine, and since most people are now working with LLMs, this measurement method is obsolete even more.

RIP Object Pascal

Why? It's still there and gets even regular maintenance.

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 Mass General Hospital in 1966. Its defining characteristic is that the language and the database are deeply integrated. There is no impedance mismatch: hierarchical, persistent sparse arrays (called globals) are a first-class part of the language syntax, acting as an early NoSQL database decades before the term existed.

Implementing this was a lot of fun, but the lexer was a real challenge. MUMPS has highly unusual whitespace semantics, and nearly all commands can be abbreviated to one or two characters. This is probably the most complex lexer in my collection. The parser was originally generated using my EbnfStudio.

There are pre-compiled versions and a MUMPS 76 Primer with modern terminology in case you want to play with it.

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, I built a faithful implementation of the 1976 MUMPS standard.

For those unfamiliar, MUMPS was born at Mass General Hospital in 1966 and ran heavily on PDP-8s and PDP-11s. It was incredibly far ahead of its time: it had a built-in hierarchical database decades before we called it 'NoSQL', allowing hospitals to do concurrent, multi-user data storage on machines with just 8K of memory.

I wanted to build an interpreter just for the original 1976 standard to preserve how it felt and worked. It includes the database, a REPL, and it's capable of running historical software from the era (like the original STARTREK application shown in the screenshot: https://github.com/rochus-keller/MUMPS/blob/main/docs/imgs/m...).

If you want to play with it, I've provided pre-compiled binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux, along with a modern Primer to help you learn the syntax.

See https://github.com/rochus-keller/MUMPS/blob/main/Readme.md#h... and https://github.com/rochus-keller/MUMPS/blob/main/docs/MUMPS_....

Which brings us back to the beginning of the conversation.

Citation needed

Various, e.g. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/05/radio-davos-jimmy-wa.... It's almost ridiculous to even question these general facts.

According to whom?

It's very founder (Wales).

Then by all means, flag them for deletion

Why should I? Who am I to decide for other people what's interesting for them? Having those articles in place doesn't bother anyone (as long as they don't violate laws) and essentially don't cost a dime.

The whole point of wikipedia was that no such silly rules were in place; a topic is worth publishing as long as there is someone willing to publish it and there are no good reasons (e.g. laws) to not to do so.

you tighten the reins or fold...

But don't tell me they will fold because they have an article about the Odin programming language. I rather think people will vote with their feet once more when they hear for what silly reasons it was deleted.

As I said, at some point the bueraucracy took over. In the good days of Wikipedia we just added or improved what interested us, no "authority" or bueraucracy involved. Here in Switzerland, we have a fitting expression for the present behavior in face of obsolescence: "schön sterben" (to die beautifully).

I'm not an Odin user, but interested in programming languages. Concerning Odin, we have these figures:

GitHub stars 10.5k, Forks 966, Contributors 537, Commits 17,511, Releases 97, latest shown as May 4 2026, Discord members 10,016.

I know of many undisputed topics on Wikipedia which have less prevalence.