The Old Hotness: M, NoSQL, and Why You Should Learn a Really Old Language

The M language/database was created in the ’60s for working with healthcare data. It was one of the first NoSQL databases using technology familiar to any modern MongoDB user. We’ll see the benefits of using a 45-year-old language, and the architecture patterns that prove new isn’t always better.

The M language/database was created in the 1960s for interacting with healthcare data. It was one of the first NoSQL databases, designed around space-efficient sparse trees for storage. Though M is much-maligned in the press, we’ll discuss how its concepts of hot NoSQL databases were in use 40 years ago, and the benefits of using a language from a time when cramming your program into available memory was a core programmer skill.