[plt-scheme] A crazy idea (fMUMPS)

--- Gregory Woodhouse <gregory.woodhouse at sbcglobal.net>
wrote: 
> On Dec 27, 2005, at 5:44 PM, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
> > 1. Health informatics is an up-and-coming field. ...
> > Neither Python nor  
> > Perl nor any of our other friends have made an in-road
> > yet. Perhaps Scheme/FP could be first in some app area.

> (Middleware, sometimes  
> dubbed "interface engines" are surprisingly popular and
> widely used  
> in medical informatics, where various communication
> standards  
> covering everything from admission/discharge/transfer to
> billing and  
> ordinary EDI plays a major role.) 

Some thoughts:

1. Solving an open problem is better than providing a
better solution to an already solved problem.  Or, more
simply, don't reimplement existing technology (MUMPs). 
Rather, implement something that MUMPs currently doesn't
address.

2. The communication standards should make language choice
irrelevant from the user's perspective, in the same way
HTTP has made server side language irrelevant for the web
browseer.  This should be an advantage.

3. The above suggest that using Scheme could be viable. 
You just need to find a small but important application to
start with.  In my experience with government institutions
there are usually hundreds of problems that people will pay
to fix but the lumbering IT department takes too long/costs
too much to address.  These are good areas to attack first.

HTH,
Noel

Email: noelwelsh <at> yahoo <dot> com   noel <at> untyped <dot> com
AIM: noelhwelsh
Blogs: http://monospaced.blogspot.com/  http://www.untyped.com/untyping/


		
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