alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
The problem with MUMPS (and RPG) is that there's so much legacy code written in the old style that you have to learn to read and write it anyway.