From MdsWiki

In the first lesson we have seen how to create and fill a MDSplus tree. It is worth noting that in the real world most data in the tree will be written by data acquisition or elaboration programs. Only configuration data and set-up parameters will be stored in the tree using TCL or jTraverser.

IMPORTANT: please note the this section describes the old data access interface of MDSplus. C++, Java and Python programmers are recommended to use the Object Oriented interface of MDSplus described in the next section. MATLAB programmers may decide to use either the interface described in this chapter or to take advantage of the Java Object Oriented interface since MATLAB allows a direct interface to Java objects (more on this in the next section). There are no plans to port the IDL interface to the new one (IDL does not support a true OO interface), while volunteers are expected to start the porting of the new interface to F90.

For most users, accessing MDSplus data represents all the required knowledge for using MDSplus. In fact, except for people working in data acquisition, looking at acquired waveforms and developing or running analysis programs are the operations routinely executed by physicists and engineers.