What? No, this isn't some niche fantasy site about puppet diseases. 'Muppet' in the UK is an affectionate term for someone daft or silly, and 'For dummies' is taken. And 'MUMPS'? Here I'm refering to the programming language/database/sometime-operating-system created in 1966, the "Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System".
As I write this, I'm re-learning MUMPS after a long period of disuse. I've programmed in many languages since, for many end-purposes, but I'm still as dense as I was in 1994. There are other introductory guides to MUMPS out there, but I've found even the friendliest of them to be North of point confusion for bears of little brain, and this is intended to be a basic introduction to programming and using MUMPS almost from the ground up. It assumes a very basic knowledge of programming, such as variables, loops, logical operations like IF this THEN that, but I hope it will be simple enough to be read by anyone interested in programming.
One of the original aims of MUMPS was to have a relatively simple language that people who were not highly trained CS graduates could effectively utilise. Indeed, though I was a huge nerd, I landed my MUMPS job (my first in IT) with no former experience or qualification to my name. I seem to remember just spurting on about my interst in green screen tech to a bemused interviewer for 10 minutes. The 'training' I had for the MUMPS language was mostly a DOS based interactive course, with various tests along the way. I wish I still had it. And then, I was let loose on real hospital systems, maintaining them and writing new modules. This was the premise of 'Teach someone who knows the bare minimum of CS this language to the point where they can write/maintain commercial software'. This is the reason for the existence of this site, as I don't think there's a resource available to learn MUMPS from the point it was meant to be accesible from - there are many historical documents on programming, modern documentation for GT.M and excellent tutorials by Prof Kevin O'Kane out there, but I feel to stay true to the original philosopy of MUMPS, there needs to be an easier introduction.
Head straight to the tutorial or read on for some history and details about MUMPS, and why it stil exists (and functions arguably better than the best modern alternatives).While it's peak popularity is well behind it, like COBOL, it lives on in more places than you'd imagine, and may touch your life more than you think.