MUMPS Programming/Intro

Welcome to my web-pages on MUMPS Programming

Niklaus Wirth, in a book named Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, felt that equation described one of the fundamental topics of computer programming. His book was published by Prentice-Hall in 1976 and is arguably one of the most influential computer science books of the time.

But if you are just starting to understand computers and programming, this is the same as saying Blargh + Foobar = Quux. It's not as simple as just explaining what each of the words mean, either. Learning to program needs a person to develop a fundamental mindset that relates things they are comfortable with, to things inside the mysterious world of computers.

I'm hoping I can avoid using too much " Computer Speak", and just avoid the jargon that people who really understand the subject use all the time. To help, I have created a page for a Glossary for the words I am using.

One of the essential issues to making computer words and ideas make sense is deciding how to describe them. I will be trying to explain a mental model that depends on very common experiences and relate the computer images to them.

For example, one way to talk about a computer is as a container of things, where each of the things is connected to other things in the computer. This allows us to talk about things happening "inside" the computer and "outside" the computer. The truth is that computers are gadgets with lots of wires and computer chips made out of silicon and metal. They don't really have an inside in the same way that a basket or a hat might have. But since computers can show the different power levels and charges using screens and printers, we can imagine the screens as a window into a place that doesn't really exist. We can't actually touch what is going on inside the computer, and if we did, we'd likely get a nasty shock, but when we look out a window in a room, we usually have a glass pane between us and everything happening outside the window.

The things happening "inside" the computer can't be touched any more than the things which we see through a window in our room. But we can still say and do things in the room that sometimes affect what is happening on the other side of the window. A computer is designed so that we have ways to say and do things so that what the computer does will change based on what we do and say.

It would be very easy if we said things in English, and a computer would react to what we say and things would change. Unfortunately, computers aren't living things, and so they don't have ears and understanding. Some very clever people are trying to understand speech and sounds, so that they can make a computer do what we say and mean, but it isn't easy, and people have been working on the problems for over fifty years. In the mean time, we have keyboards, and a mouse so that people can give information to a computer. It's really not a very good solution, but it is the only one we have that consistently works.