Thank you Marc

I'm Impressed. That assumes that a word does not change meaning based on the characters to the left or right. So I assume you have taken that into account in your solution as I believe that Chinese is one of those languages that can mean different things depending on the surrounding words and even tone. But then, China is not part of NATO, so the question is academic.

How about French? Does anyone have a French example of conveying masculine/feminine attributes in the resultant interpreted message? i.e. how do you ensure you get your Le's and La's right?

Ok, now it's me being silly. I suspect there is no shorter version of this code, so well done to the winner.

You can make it smaller by removing the #dim, which is not required.

The only time I use #dim is if I am working with a class that I have got to via an object chain:

set class=##class(%Dictionary.CompiledClass).%OpenId("MyClass") for i=1:1:class.Properties.Count() set tProp=class.Properties.GetAt(i)  write !,prop.Name

In that case, I will use '#dim tProp as %Dictionary.CompiledProperies' as I don't remember all of the properties in the CompileProperties class. Once the code works, I remove the #dim.

If you are a masochist and like a little pain, here is a lengthy description of another scenario where I use #dim where I have many very similar classes in content, and I use a lot of $clssmethods and $properties in my code. 

Let us assume you have three message classes. The message classes will have some properties that are common to all message classes, and the message classes differ only in the fields they contain that are derived from the source system that created the message:

The base properties are the Create/Process/Completed TimeStamps, RequestFHIRJSON, ResponseFHIRJSON, RequestHL7Message, ResponseHL7Message, FileDirectory, SourceFileName, ResponseFileName, HTTPMethod, HTTPResponseCode, RequestStatus, MessageStatus, MessageTextNotification and a few others.

The HL7 or FHIR message that is created by a Data Transform (DTL) that transforms data in the source database into the target HL7 or FHIR message

The Message also contains the HL7 or FHIR response message (Operation Outcome in the case of FHIR, ACK/NACK for HL7)

Yous have methods to CreateMessage(), UpdateMessage(), GetNextMessage(), Complete Message(), ResendMessage(), PurgeMessages()

The variable properties in my three examples are:

1) PatientID for Message 1

2) PatientNumber, VisitNumber, EpisodeNumber, ActivityDate for Message 2

3) Hospital Folder Number in Message 3

The Methods I have listed all contain $classmethod calls, and I don't really need to worry about the fields specific to the type of message. If I am creating a message or updating a message, I pass an array of DataTypes into the method where the 'key' in the array is the property name, and the 'Value' is the value for that property.

I do use the %Dictionary.CompiledClass definition for the Message Class definitions so that I can determine whether the Property referenced in the Array of Datatypes is a %Library Data Type, a Foreign Key or Designative reference to a value in another class or a Collection/Array/List so that I know whether I am just setting the property value in my message object to the value in the Array of Property Values or if the property value is the ID of an object in another class in which case I will use a SetObjectIdAt() on the value and in the case of the List/Array Collections I either use SetAt() or InsertAt(). As I am using the CompiledClass Dictionary reference, I check to see if the property in the Array of Datatypes exists in the properties of the message class. However, in my Business Process, I want to get the Message fields because they will tell me what Class/Table I will access using the data supplied to retrieve the source record fed into the DTL to generate the FHIR/HL7 message. 

The Business Process has been passed an Ensemble Request message with the MessageId returned by the GetNextMessage() method, which my Business Service calls. The Business Service has a property "Message Queue Class Name" configured when I add the service to the production.

The Business Process Opens the Message Object and in that case I use a #DIM purely that when I use 

set obj=$classmethod({message_Queue_Class_name},"%OpenId",{Message_Id})

set tPatientId=obj.PatientId, and because I have used #dim the editor will provide a list of property names as I type in obj. and that makes it easier to select the field that I want to access. I have used simple examples for the variable fields in my different message class examples. Still, as my Message Queue Classes have about 15 common Properties, it is useful to have that IntelliSense functionality so that I don't have to keep remembering whether my common property name was SourceFHIRMessage or SouirceMessageFHIR. 

Once my code works, I comment out the #dim line rather than remove it so that if someone else has to maintain my code, they can uncomment the #dim statement. It may then help them with the Intellisense on the Property Names on the class being Manipulated.

Hi Robert

I desperately need an example of Angular using REST to talk to a FHIR server to convince the company that we should be using Iris for Health and Angular for our upcoming developments. The issue is I don't know angular, I understand Rest and I understand FHIR. How can I get up and running in Angualr in the next 3 days.

Nigel

Hi

Please can you explain a little more about the terms contiuous integration and jenkins

Thanks

Nigel

That looks great. I've been exploring other Developer Communities (no, I am not going to defect, I am looking for inspiration from the Python/R/Angular communities), and none of them is as nice and clean and fresh and as well thought out as the ISC DC is, along with OEX and GM.

I asked a question on one of them, and it was rejected for some violation of their stringent rules of what is a question vs a comment vs a .... they sent me a 500-page user manual on the rules. It felt like being back at school. The tone of the email they sent me detailing why my question wasn't a question had the same tone of voice that the wife of the Head Master at the boarding school had when she caught us swimming in the school swimming pool while she was searching the school grounds and all of the hiding places where the headmaster could sneak into to have a drink which was strictly against the school rules as we were a Methodist School. You should have seen her face, on the day, in front of Parents and Schoolboys, when the addiction he had so skilfully kept hidden for most of the 20 years that he had been at the school, were unexpectedly revealed when he fell off the stage into the band area in front of the stage and having picked himself up, he promptly tripped and fell into the strings of the ancient grand piano. The DC Moderator I offended wasn't as drunk as our headmaster nor quite as rude as the headmaster's wife as she screamed at him while the Parent and boys fell off their chairs in either religious shock or convulsive laughter.

Then I came across KDN*G%ETS (sp??) with the main Editor getting into arguments with the DC members who were voicing their opinions of his "5 Best Python Examples for 2021' which, most members agreed, was terrible. The first app was no better than "Hello World" but less fun, the second didn't work, the third was just pointless, even as an example, and quite possibly illegal because if a new developer were to try it, they would most likely never code in their lives again as it was the coding equivalent 'self-harm with nailbrush and bleach'. The 4th was ok but, as one person commented, "it would be quicker to go 'Hey Google, what's the weather like today?'" and the 5th one wasn't a code example at all. It was an advertisement for Jungle Finger Nails and had nothing to do with python other than you sometimes find pythons in jungles.

He was getting quite upset at being treated so awfully by his readers. He pointed out that it had been given a badge of 'best contribution of the month'. It would have been interesting to know what the competition had been because it was quite hard to imagine just how bad those contributions must have been. Secondly, as another helpful DC member pointed out, it was the Editor who had awarded the badge to his own article.

The Home Page had been designed using those three winning web design methodologies that advocate:

cramming as much stuff onto the page as possible, preferably at right angles to the surrounding elements. They had used an assortment of colours that had been chosen on the basis that they were unique (read 'no one would use that colour because it is really horrible'),

balanced, tasteful palette (read 'Orange and Purple really do go very well together, my girlfriend does this thing with Orange and Purple and it's a really cool man'),

and finally the ' HTML 5 without animation is like, /...., well,/... you know its like.... ' (read, 'if the thing next to this thing isn't flashing then you must make it flash and hop across to those cute green and pink SVGs fighting in the Title bar and noooo,... you know you can't have a blink rate on the exclamation points slower than the edge lighting colour change inspired by the lesser-known and largely forgotten collection of musical ditties - 'Experiments and variations on Bach in D#, F minor, with Geese and Zither' by Dvorak.  I am sure that the twitching that has developed in my left eye is somehow linked to accidentally opening newsletter emails from K%79&$*S and not being able to delete them quickly enough.

Hi

I'd be interested in participating. An opportunity to work with a technology that I am very aware if but has not been a requirement in the work I do though HST has built an Operational Data Store.and we have a BI analyst who uses Deep See (Ensemble 2018). And Analytics in IRIS has gone to a whole new level. So yes I would like to participate. On IRIS?

Nigel

Hi Andre

I have read your article and I think that it is worthy of being included in this thread as you speak many truths. I am sure that many people work with technology, from the Customer Project Managers, the Business Analysts, the Team Leaders, the Scrum Master, the Senior Developers, Junior Developers, Testers, Customer UAT testers, and ultimately the Users of the resultant Technology Solution who view their role in the chain with Blinkers and work on the basis that as long as they do their job properly (and that is a word that can mean many different things) and are either unconcerned about the people who fill the other roles in the chain or view them as a necessary evil. But I also believe that there are technologists who are very conscious of the fact that they are an important element in the overall delivery of a solution. It is very rare to find people who can wear the hat of all of the players in this chain. I have met maybe 3 people in my entire career who just stood head and shoulders above everyone else in their ability to communicate and understand the needs and requirements of the customer,  translate those requirements into a set of tasks for the Business Analysts to prioritize, document, create the project scope and timeline, write requirement specifications that can be understood by the customer and the development team, be able to sit with the senior developers and discuss the possible approaches to crafting a solution, who can clearly identify which tasks should be handled by the senior developers and those that should be delegated to the more junior developers, create testing plans for the testers and the documentation writers and ultimately guide the Customer UAT team through the stringent test scenarios to ensure that the application does what was requested, does not crash, does not present the user with an explosion of colour and animation and finally go back to the customer and get that all-important sign-off so that the invoicing and payments can be finalised. Some of us have been lucky enough to have been assigned to a project where we were able to interact with the customer, understand their business, understand their pain or their ambitions, then take that knowledge and produce the requirement specifications, technical process flows, choose the software elements, write the code that pulls all of the components into a functioning whole, documents their code such that future developers who have to work with that code can do so without messing it up because they are unaware that a statement in line 23 of 5000 lines will inadvertently cause the logic on line 2356 to take an unexpected step to the left and render the program unusable. Very few developers get to spend time with the quality assurance staff and ultimately the users who have to use the application to do their jobs and be able to go home without a blinding headache and a sense of dread that tomorrow they are going to have to fight with the application to get the printout or that all-important "Your data has been saved. Click OK to proceed" popup.  

I have seldom met a programmer who will concede that their code is not as good as the person coding next to them, or for that matter finding a developer who can gracefully and politely read some truly awful code of another developer and take the time to work with that bad developer and help them become a better programmer without inadvertently step on 1 f 20 emotional and ideological traps that arise in every one of these encounters. Or maybe I would use the analogy of the McDonalds Ice-cream specialist who was born to whip up the most perfect McFlurry who has to stand and watch a steady stream of ice-cream servers who don't give a damn and will be leaving in a month to go and pour soda at Wendy's. 

For the last 50 years software creators, whether they be individuals or technology companies, have discussed, and theorized, and consulted psychologists and time-management experts, and even astrologers to come up with the definitive guide to creating perfect, absolutely perfect, application. Entire libraries of books and templates and methodologies and Predictive Indicators intended to match the right person to the right role and despite those 50 years and the brilliant, practical, theorists and technologists who have contributed, with dedication and fervor to this topic, And yet, for every model that has emerged from these think tanks, 100 bad applications are spilling out the doors of the technology companies.

And I haven't even started on the external forces, the project managers, the customer relations manager, the accountants, the middle managers, and worst of all the salesmen who, in just doing their jobs, manage to inflict sufficient damage to the 'plan' thus guaranteeing that the final product will be ....less.

But then you encounter a group of people who have formed themselves into a community, a 'Developer Community', who come from a myriad of different backgrounds, skills, methodologies, personalities, and socio-economic, gender-based cultures who miraculously have one thing in common. They love to code. Their hearts soar when they interact with a user who says 'Thank you because of some modification that they have made that has made that user's life just that little bit better. And all of us have at some time or other written a bad piece of code or have struggled to fit into the 'TEAM', or had to deal with a salesman who has sold unrealistic solutions and unachievable timelines to a customer who in reality didn't actually know what they actually wanted to start with. We have seen it all, we have notched up successes and strive hard to forget the failures and yet we go to bed at night and we dream of tropical islands with dancers wrapped in fine silks with pet tigers on leads and woken up the following morning with 5 pages of code written vividly on the insides of their skulls and in a blinding flash of light they know that they have cracked it. The mists of possibilities and uncertainties and intrusions and indecision that has plagued them for the previous 4 weeks have overnight coalesced into the 'Perfect' solution. Their fingers are already tapping at their laptops as they eat their breakfast and for the next 8, 18, 80 hours magic flows from their fingers into that IDE that is the interface between their imagination and the architecture that will swallow up their code and compile it into the module and voila! It's done, and it's beautiful.

And then we go home and get up the next day and do it all again. And as we create solutions we come to our community and we bounce ideas off each other, we seek out the nuggets of knowledge and experience from our friends who went through the process of being the first person to master a technique or understand a piece of functionality that is almost incomprehensible to most of us because or minds might not be wired in such a way that understanding that functionality was as easy as watching the Eurovision song contest without crying.

What we all share in common though are years and years of tuning our coding styles, learning and absorbing emerging technologies, developing the skills to share our knowledge with the people we work with without making them run from the room sobbing because you have been too brutal in your appraisal of their work and it is through a community like ours that so many of us have become the skilled and dedicated developers that we are.

What I do know is that generally speaking, I have met more developers who have been able to help the Business Analysts understand the requirements, ask the right questions of the customer to find out what they actually need, pacify the project managers that their agile, and scrum, and Jira, and storyboards will get to the finish line without incurring penalties for late delivery. Who find the time to document their code knowing that no matter how well it is written it is going to take another developer some time to work out what you have written and how it fits into the bigger picture and finally, one day, they get to meet the user who is using that application who turns round and comments that this application has helped them get their work done quickly and efficiently, that doesn't shower them with pompous popups asking them how they could be so stupid to put a text letter into a numeric field. 

We may not be able to ensure that every element in the chain is going to work as expected and that ideas and requirements don't occasionally get twisted in translation nor make every single user equally happy but we can control the space that we occupy and we know what we are doing and we have adopted different coding styles over the years and we find our selves at a point where we believe that we can layout a template, a structure, a developers ethical code and produce a set of standards and conventions on which we all (give or take) agree, if followed, will stand a chance of guaranteeing that the programs we write work, are readable and maintainable and when fitted into the whole will generate an application that works, is good, beautiful even.

We take pride in our community. We welcome the input of the outside world, we like to learn and experiment and listen to the experiences of our comrades and when we are in Boston we will gather in a fairly dark room and drink a little too much and listen and watch as one of ours demonstrates his latest little app or tool or plugin and it makes us happy and we feel very much at home.

Nigel. 

When i run the following:

set srv = $system.external.getServers()

write srv.%ToJSON()
["%DotNet Server","%IntegratedML Server","%JDBC Server","%Java Server","%Python Server","%R Server","%XSLT Server"]

R does appear

Nigel

Hi Ben

I certainly would like to join the Python EAP. I was actually sent an invite but it slipped through the gap and I had communicated with Eduard to issue another Invite. I have already installed the InterSystems IRIS 2021.1 PYTHON kit and I just need a license. At Anastasia's recommendation, I sent a request to Bob to get a license. I don't know if it's too late to join the current EAP as gather there will be another one but if I can join in the current one then that would be great

Hi Ben

Yeah, I added the comments about APL because I just happened to notice it in Wiki while looking at R and it reminded me of my Actuarial days. It was a curious language being almost entirely symbolic in nature. The standard "Hello World" program that every language tutorial teaches was something more like 

I learned it in 1981 and I see that there have been releases of APL2 and so I guess that somewhere someone is using it (probably in Mathematical Modelling which is what many Actuaries do instead of designing Insurance Policies and staring at Life Expectancy Tables which was what Actuaries did in those day) and I think that a language like Julia (which I have also downloaded and played with a few months ago is much more suited to Pure Math). Can I ask a question, I notice that Python is an Interpreted language like ObjectScript. Was that part of the decision to include it into InterSystems IRIS (and also that it is one of the most popular languages on the Top 10 language list) based on the fact that it could ultimately be compiled down to .obj code?

Can't wait for Python, I checked out R on Wiki. It looks interested for graph plotting and statistical analysis. The Wiki page also mentioned APL which is defined as:

APL (named after the book A Programming Language)^[3] is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols^[4] to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming,^[5] and computer math packages.^[6] It has also inspired several other programming languages.^[7][8]

^{in Wiki}

^{I learned this language while I was studying to become an actuary and during the university holidays I worked at Legal & General who were the Insurance company who were sponsoring my University Tuition and during or of these work experience holidays, instead of putting me in the room where the actuaries worked, they put me ina room with an IBM computer with a special keyboard and told me that this computer was specifically designed to run APL programs. Here are some examples of the language:}

Simple statistics[edit]

Suppose that X is an array of numbers. Then (+/X)÷⍴X gives its average. Reading right-to-left, ⍴X gives the number of elements in X, and since ÷ is a dyadic operator, the term to its left is required as well. It is in parenthesis since otherwise X would be taken (so that the summation would be of X÷⍴X, of each element of X divided by the number of elements in X), and +/X adds all the elements of X. Building on this, ((+/((X - (+/X)÷⍴X)*2))÷⍴X)*0.5 calculates the standard deviation. Further, since assignment is an operator, it can appear within an expression, so

SD←((+/((X - AV←(T←+/X)÷⍴X)*2))÷⍴X)*0.5

Prime numbers[edit]

The following expression finds all prime numbers from 1 to R. In both time and space, the calculation complexity is {\displaystyle O(R^{2})\,\!} (in Big O notation).

(~R∊R∘.×R)/R←1↓ιR

Executed from right to left, this means:

• Iota ι creates a vector containing integers from 1 to R (if R= 6 at the start of the program, ιR is 1 2 3 4 5 6)
• Drop first element of this vector (↓ function), i.e., 1. So 1↓ιR is 2 3 4 5 6
• Set R to the new vector (←, assignment primitive), i.e., 2 3 4 5 6
• The / replicate operator is dyadic (binary) and the interpreter first evaluates its left argument (fully in parentheses):
• Generate outer product of R multiplied by R, i.e., a matrix that is the multiplication table of R by R (°.× operator), i.e.,

• Build a vector the same length as R with 1 in each place where the corresponding number in R is in the outer product matrix (∈, set inclusion or element of or Epsilon operator), i.e., 0 0 1 0 1
• Logically negate (not) values in the vector (change zeros to ones and ones to zeros) (∼, logical not or Tilde operator), i.e., 1 1 0 1 0
• Select the items in R for which the corresponding element is 1 (/ replicate operator), i.e., 2 3 5

And I wrote a number of programs which had the IT department asking "How on earth did you do that and what does it mean?" to which I replied "I asked the computer to do this for me and it said 'Yes Nigel' and the programs worked. It was then that I knew I was destind to become a developer . When, a few years later in London I was introduced to Multidimedsional structures I already knew what they were because of my exposure to APL.

Dear InterSystems, how about introducing APL into our library of analytical programming languages?

Nigel

Hi Utsavi

How are you doing with this challenge. Have you got a working solution yet? If so please can I have a look.  If I have managed to help get you to where you need to be please mark one of my replies as an acceted answer

Thanks

Nigel

Olga, I love you! and my InterSystems Logitec Camera arrived yesterday and it is beautifully designed and solid and take great pictures and videos so that along with my JBL clip and my InterSystems socks are my 3 most prized possessions at the moment so the opportunity to earn extra points and I'm looking forward to the next great reward that we can aim for when redeeming points. 

Hi Robert

This is an ambitious project with a wide scope of scenarios to take into account. I have spent quite a lot of time recently looking through OEX to find applications that might contain code or functionality that would help me understand how to use features of IRIS or external technologies such as Bootstrap, Angular, Python.  This took me into a world of Node.js, NPM, Gradle, Gulp, GIT,  TypeScript,  Packages which I have either had little or no knowledge of as they have never been required in the applications that I have built over the last 30 years. To be quite honest I have relied on the Readme.MD files in the OEX install kits to install many of the applications that looked promising. I follow the instructions and generally speaking 90% of the 50 applications that I downloaded did install easily and though I didn't necessarily always run the application (as I was more interested in the application code) but those that I did run worked as expected.

Some of the OEX Readme.MD documents are very good with detailed installation notes (especially those that take into consideration that not everyone is using UNIX or Docker or Containers or ZPM so I appreciate it when they include installation notes for each of these scenarios). Information on any prerequisite requirements is especially appreciated when they involve 3rd party apps or utilities that may not be familiar to those of us who have lived in a Cache/Ensemble/IRIS cocoon for many year. Step-by-step installation guides and how to activate the application once it is installed are very important especially when the application makes use of 3rd party technologies.

Of the 50 apps I downloaded there were very few examples where the Readme.MD file contained only the barest of information but none were so limited that I was unable to install or use the code. When the Readme.MD file is expansive I have developed a habit of copying the contents into a word document and filing them for future reference as well as adding them into the company knowledge base for other developers to review. One area of documentation that tends to be overlooked iare notes on how to uninstall the application. Applications that have been installed using NPM Install can be uninstalled with NPM Uninstall. Many of the apps that I have downloaded recently were built using ZPM and as we don't yet use IRIS at the company I work for any exploration of IRIS has had to be in my own time and so I started using ZPM and have used it to download quite a few repos. I was very impressed. There have been 2 or 3 installs that threw up errors as they required an earlier version of npm  or some other 3rd party component than the version installed by other applications and generated either medium or fatal errors. Some of them can be fixed by using npm audit fix or npm audit fix -force.

One of the applications I installed "Forms" installed entire libraries of bootstrap/MDB/Font-awesome kits of .js/.css/fonts/images/icons and I am not sure how easy it would be to uninstall it cleanly. In an extreme example such as this then I think that there should be comprehensive notes on how to uninstall the application and remove any residual files and directories that remain after the uninstall. So I think that your rating algorithm should factor in the quality of the uninstall instructions based on the complexity of the installation.

 I would be very willing to assist you in this exercise if there is anything that I could contribute.

I also think that as DC members we should be more proactive in writing reviews of applications we have downloaded and comment on our experience of installing and using the application, how our knowledge of the technologies used has been benefitted, and maybe some notes on why other DC members should consider downloading the app if it is a really good example of an IRIS component usage especially if they have been able to leverage that knowledge in the development work they do in their day jobs. 

One final comment I'd like to make is that the Coding Competitions have been an excellent way of getting developers to explore aspects of IRIS and IRIS for Health that they are probably not being exposed to in their day jobs and has resulted in some truly useful applications especially in the areas of VS Code extensions, ML, AI, Python, Angular, Node.js, Git which are used by so many developers who do not use InterSystems products and as InterSystems are investing a lot of energy in integrating these technologies into IRIS which goes a long way to encourage developers who don't currently use InterSystems products to start seeing IRIS as an interesting technology to investigate especially if they can adopt IRIS into their current development toolset supported by a vibrant Developer Community, well documented, and an ever-increasing repository of  sample applications that use technologies such as Node.js, Python, Angular, JSON, OAuth which are all high on the list of most popular languages and security solutions.

Nigel