Q&A: Philip Newcomb on MUMPS and VistA Refactoring

Rarely is agency use of a particular programming language the subject of discussion at senior levels of agency leadership or during congressional hearings, but the Veterans Affairs Department's usage of MUMPS has, for better or worse, gained that distinction.

Most recently, VA announced selection of a "custodial agent" that will oversee an open source ecosystem of developers seeking, among other projects, to refactor modules of the VistA electronic health record system with modern languages.

This isn't the first time that the VA has looked into replacing MUMPS, however; it ran a pilot project in 2005 to look at the automatic conversion of MUMPS into J2EE Java.

Philip Newcomb, chief executive officer of the Kirkland, Wa.-based The Software Revolution Inc., which performed the pilot, recently wrote a case-study about it in "Information Systems Transformation," a 2010 book he co-wrote with William Ulrich, president and founder of the Tactical Strategy Group , of Soquel, Calif.

We're excerpting the case study here but we also recently talked with Newcomb about MUMPS and the pilot he helped execute.