Someone should explain to me why , a million dollar piece of software, doesn't have customization for its shortcut keys.

I REALLY want to be able to set up a workflow in that ONLY uses the keyboard. I should be able to do that. It's ridiculous.

@War_Kittens From what I have heard, Epic is a fossil of a company that only lives because of the HITECH act. Its servers use a language called MUMPS that is literally from the PDP-10 era and which probably is similarly of obscenely great age.

@War_Kittens While the company in this article is not named, the commenters have identified it as Epic, and Epic does indeed use Mumps and Visual Basic.

thedailywtf.com/articles/A_Cas

A Case of the MUMPS

You may not realize it, but the majority of us developers have been living a sheltered professional life. Sure, we’ve got that living disaster of a C++ application and that ridiculous interface between PHP and COBOL written by the boss, but I can assure you, that all pales in comparison to what many, less fortunate programmers have to work with each day. These programmers remain mostly forgotten, toiling away at a dead-end career maintaining ancient information systems whose ridiculously shoddy architecture is surpassed only by the tools used to create it. Bryan H lived in such a world for over two years. Specifically, he worked at a “MUMPS shop.” With no experience and a three-week old college diploma, Bryan was pretty happy to land his first programming job. He had never heard of the programming language that the company used, but he was assured that he’d receive plenty of training and should have trouble picking it up. And they weren’t joking about “plenty of training.” Bryan’s first three months were spent entirely in a classroom filled with other recent grads, all learning about what the next forty years of their lives had in store: MUMPS, MUMPS, more MUMPS, and, if they were extra lucky, a dash of Visual Basic.

thedailywtf.com

@mathlover
It's worlds better than the alternative — Cerner. I have no idea how Cerner even got as far as a billion dollar company. Each of its sections is an entirely different program. Open a new task, oh that's different program even though it just looks like a window.

@War_Kittens That sounds awful, and also not surprising given that the HITECH act had a severely anticompetitive effect on the market for EHR software.

@mathlover @War_Kittens there was a valiant attempt about ten years back to migrate components from VB over to C#/.NET webapps, but it sounds like it never got much traction internally.

I asked once why stick with such an old version of Caché/MUMPS, when newer versions had nice modern ergonomics like C# or Java. The answer I got back was ✨back-compatibility✨ with all the third-party db hooks installed by consultants.

@aladyjewel @War_Kittens The story also mentions Telnet being used. When my father (medical doctor) uses Epic, he has to do it via a VPN, presumably to encrypt the Telnet connection.

Please tell me they've actually switched to SSH now.

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