Re: Dentist Management Software
On Thu, 22 May 2008, David Paleino wrote:
It is not any more complex than it needs to be.
Oh well, it is "complex" to me. I'm not a *real* Python coder, I can just put
together some lines...
Over the years I observed the problem that there are so many half done medical
projects which never reach any usable state because they are more or less one
man shows written in a programming language that this one man just knows by
chance. Cooperation does not happen because the protagonists just speak
different programming languages. So we are beaten by the fact that there are
so many shiny programming languages available that cooperation on niche
products (yes, I regard Free Medical Software as a niche product considering
the number of users we actually have) is effectively blocked.
So I would not claim that Python is the best language to pick (probably there
is no such thing like the best language) for the purpose you have in mind but
there is no reason against Python at least. The big advantage that there is
a project which looks somehow promissing and which existed and evolved over
several years which is a good quality measure considering other projects that
had a much shorter live cycle. Keeping this in mind I would regard this as
a good reason to learn Python (which is not that hard) and try to adopt as
much as possible from GNUmed.
That's rather easy in a language you know (-- I don't really know Python, I go
by trial-and-error ;) )
That's a start, isn't it? ;-)
In fact, GNUmed is a lot less complex semantically than what it needs to
become - it doesn't cover any billing or prescribing so far.
True, and I'd need that as well.
If GNUmed manages to attract more developers (I hope you will not be the only
one) chances are good that billing and prescribing might be added sooner or
later and I see no reason why a project written from scratch should implement
these features faster than a project that has reached a certain state.
Dentists need a more specific software (i.e. usually they also have a
printout of teeth to click on and select treatment).
That would be fairly easy to add.
Again, for any *python coder* ;)
I feel far more comfortable with C#, which OpenDental is written in.
How did you gained your C# knowledge? You will see that learning Python
is much easier, because has a much less overhead. BTW, I would not like
to persuade you to join GNUmed. If you think that chances are good to
profit from OpenDental code at large scale this is fine as well. The only
advise is to not to start just another one-man-show project. You have to
form a community around your project. If you fail in doing so you have
good chances to have spend your time in something that will bit-rot after
five or ten years (depending from your luck or your effort you have to put
into your real job where you gain some money from). So just try to spend
your time into a project that sounds promising for the future.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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