![]() ![]() We were born at the beginning of civilization. I'd say we're already in the Manhattan project era of computing. The Unix-Haters Handbook has evidence from James Roskind who tried to make a yacc grammar for C++ - to a first approximation, an impossible thing to do due to a few goofy design decisions in the C++ grammar - and who said that every time when he tried to feed cfront input that would enlighten him with respect to some dark corner of the grammar, cfront crashed.) but unfortunately I can't find the Usenet old posts telling that cfront was the buggiest C++ compiler of its time, and that early g++ was the next buggiest. (Here's a bunch of bugs found by modern static analysis tools. ![]() Since I'm not sure that this was written seriously, I'll point to anecdotal evidence of cfront, Stroustrup's C++ compiler, being the buggiest C++ compiler ever written. ![]() If I were sure that this was written seriously I should have replied along the lines of there being few chances for such an amazing resource as the best programmers in the world by a large margin to be untapped by greedy capitalists who'd then topple America's software empires. Any papers are in languages that are not understood in the English-speaking world and translation is not always available. I think the reason why you may not find many Greeks or Italians, or generally people from non-English speaking countries in the history of computing is the opposite of what you suggest: any contributions they might be able to make are hard to transfer over to the English-speaking world. I think the same would go for Italians and even more so, since English has borrowed a lot from Latin, which is basically just an older form of Italian (with high school Latin, you can understand Italian perfectly well and even parse sentences on the fly as people speak to you :) Not so with computers- and I never had trouble with programming languages. I live and work in the UK now, but when I first landed on these rain-sodden shores, my spoken English was bad and I had trouble communicating with people. Speaking as a Greek person who is also quite average, English was never a problem getting into programming. > it's much easier for an average Scandinavian or Dutch teenager or college student to get into computer science than for an average Italian or Greek. Oh, and they have all had a generous welfare states for the past 50-100 years so even back when computer science didn't pay well it wasn't so risky to go down that path. So it's much easier for an average Scandinavian or Dutch teenager or college student to get into computer science than for an average Italian or Greek. Virtually all the popular programming languages use English terms, most (all?) articles are in English and almost all documentation and tutorials are in English years before they are translated to local languages (if ever). You get nowhere in computer science without a good understanding of English. What do these countries have in common? They are close to each other, they had strong universities within science or engineering before the computer revolution, they have been wealthy for the past 50 years or more and they speak English as a first language or as a strong second language. ![]() I am sure American, French or Spanish programmers think for themselves too and that they also take pride in their work.įirst of all, a number of nations in Northern Europe have done well in tech: Dutch (python), Norwegians (css, opera), Swedes (erlang, skype), Finns (linux, nokia) and Brits. That article is just a bunch of prejudices. ![]()
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