@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.
@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.
@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.
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/A_Case_of_the_MUMPS