Well, try to run C++, C# or Java on a PDP-7 or PDP-9.

In 1976, the year of the first standard, massive hospitals with thousands of patients run on MUMPS, on PDP machines with 8K to 24K of core memory and many concurrent users.

This article is terrible and I hate that people always bring it up whenever MUMPS is mentioned here.

MUMPS is easy to read, understand and maintain when written well.

These examples (and the Wikipedia ones) are from code written when hospitals needed to run their whole EMR with extreme storage constraints, so more terse code was necessary to fit more on the disk. Of course they aren’t readable by modern standards.