Thoughts about the difference between European and American H/W and S/W design

https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/72876.html

by lproven • 6 years ago

109 156 6 years ago

liam-on-linux.livejournal.com

Causality1• 6 years ago

I think the oversight in this article is the survivor bias regarding American designs. There were plenty of those fast, efficient designs from American developers but they too died in the avalanche of big-team giants.

willvarfar• 6 years ago

I don't doubt you, I just don't know of many, so some examples please?

magicalhippo2• 6 years ago

I also think it severely underestimates the advantage of having such a large internal market.

Having access to a large internal market allows you to grow to a fairly large size while still only serving that internal market. Then, when you want to expand abroad, you're likely in a much better financial position to take on the expenses of dealing with lots various local laws and regulations.

DoingIsLearning• 6 years ago

having such a large internal market.

... (I would add to your statement) with a large amount of median disposable income. Adding to this, a large numbers of consumers who have access to consumer credit and are far less reluctant to purchase on credit than other nations.

A lot of countries have a large internal market but not all of them actually have the purchase power or the inclination to spend on novel non-established products as much as the US market.

mschuster91• 6 years ago

And I think a big reason is that Europe was poorer, so product development was all about efficiency, cost-reduction, high performance and sparing use of resources. The result was very fast, efficient products.

While Europe is poorer, the issue is not a focus on fast/efficient products... rather that US companies have access to incredible amounts of "dumb money" via pension funds that they can use to simply flatten (or buy up) any European competition. Either via outright price dumping (Uber), via lobbying efforts (Microsoft), by marketing (Apple) or by having access to way more R&D resources than European companies (Apple again).

theandrewbailey• 6 years ago

This seems to be a list of things that Europe used to have. Here's some counterpoints that you might be thinking of:

The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.

The best selling CPUs (ARM) are ultimately of British origin.

The Web was created by a Brit at CERN (Switzerland).

Raspberry Pis are quite popular, and British. (Also has an ARM CPU, and often runs Linux, sometimes with a web server. Nifty!)

Kuinox5• 6 years ago

The web ? We had minitel in France.

twic• 6 years ago

And the first microcomputer:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micral

I only found out about this because its inventor, André Truong, studied at EFREI at around the same time as Pol Pot. Fortunately, Truong was a much better engineer, and did something more constructive with his life.

msla4• 6 years ago

Minitel wasn't really the same kind of thing as the Internet or the web.

pilsetnieks2• 6 years ago

And the other small hobbyist computing platform, Arduino, is Italian;

Python was created by a Dutch programmer;

PHP, the much maligned bastard language that still runs most of the web, was created by a Danish Canadian.

Even from his own examples, Ada and Pascal (as in Delphi) are still widely used, though probably in limited circles.

Insanity• 6 years ago

To add a few:

C# / TypeScript / Turbo Pascal / Delphi: Anders Hejlsberg had a lot of influence even though C# /TS are MSFT langs, and he is Danish

Haskell's GHC: _glasgow_ haskell compiler, Scotland

EDIT to clarify

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rimliu2• 6 years ago

Skype: founded by a Swede and a Dane, coded by Estonians. MySQL: a Finn and a Swede.

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jjcon6• 6 years ago

The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.

By a Finnish guy that moved to the US (and is a US citizen)

The best selling CPUs (ARM) are ultimately of British origin.

The instruction set for the cpus originated in Britain (now japan), the cpu design is almost all based in the US (Qualcomm, Broadcom, Apple).

The Web was created by a Brit at CERN (Switzerland).

The web was started by a Brit yes, the internet started long before in the US.

Raspberry Pis are quite popular, and British.

True

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dvfjsdhgfv• 6 years ago

> The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.
By a Finnish guy that moved to the US (and is a US citizen)

When he moved to the USA Linux was already a popular OS, and he didn't move here in order to develop the kernel but to work for Transmeta.

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readmodifywrite• 6 years ago

The CPU implementation is done by Qualcomm, Apple, and the like. The CPU design is done by ARM, predominantly in the UK. The fact that Softbank (Japan) owns ARM has no bearing on where and who is doing the actual technical work.

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Espressosaurus• 6 years ago

Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Apple all license ARM designs. They're not the ones designing new ARM cores, they're licensing them. They're attaching all kinds of interesting other bits and bobs directly to those ARM cores, which is where their special sauce comes in. You can say the SOC design is all based in the US, but the CPU design is based in...wherever ARM does its CPU design. Which to be honest I don't know. :)

Maybe it's just pedantry since the SOCs are what has resulted in ARM taking over the mobile space (and also a big chunk of the embedded space. Your SSD and HDDs likely have multiple ARM cores).

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esperent10• 6 years ago

This article has a huge cultural blind spot. What about Asia? Probably most of the hardware in your phone was designed in Asia. Arm, originally from the UK, is now Japanese owned. ATI is Canadian, which also doesn't get a mention.

When it comes to programming languages, C++ and C# were both created by Danes, although they were working in the US at the time. Presumably because that's where the money was. Does that mean the US gets to claim these languages?

Personally, I think it just invalidates the whole argument of what is American and what is European. Creation of modern tech is a global effort. If you look inside any modern laptop or smartphone you'll find that most it was manufactured in Asia, and that the software and hardware design was split between many different countries and continents, and that the actual people doing the work are even more diverse.

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_2d304• 6 years ago

Probably most of the hardware in your phone was designed in Asia

It doesn’t appear to be true at all for Apple phones: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+11+Pro+Max+Teardown/1...

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gambiting• 6 years ago

Apple devices are a tiny minority on the broader scale.

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...

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esperent10• 6 years ago

Most iPhones are made in China with parts manufactured by FoxConn. Maybe it's different for US iPhones?

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jjcon6• 6 years ago

Presumably because that's where the money was. Does that mean the US gets to claim these languages?

I mean I don’t think it really matters but if they moved to the US because the US economy was valuing those things then it’s the product of the American economy from a economic point of view.

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lubonay• 6 years ago

I agree. If we invert the argument: just because C++ and C# were designed by Danes, does that make them Danish languages? That sounds absurd! It's almost like saying the iPhone is a Syrian product because Steve Jobs' biological father was Syrian.

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anticristi2• 6 years ago

I am speculating here, but I think the US was among the first to realise that access to state-of-the-art computing is a national security issue. Therefore, the US government essentially subsidized IT R&D (e.g. Silicon valley, this is confirmed by Wikipedia) giving the US a huge heads up to the fragmented EU granting/capital (and likely Asian, but I don't know) landscape. Therefore, we now live in a legacy where, although tech is a global phenomenon, it is largely controlled by US capital, with other players (EU, CN, JP) playing catch-up.

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rimliu2• 6 years ago

Yep. Ruby came from Japan, Ruby on Rails came from Denmark. Guido van Rossum is from Netherlands. Rasmus Lerdorf if Danish-Canadian. What's it about Danes and languages? :)

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wenc• 6 years ago

Since we're making lists:

Java is Canadian. APL and J are Canadian. R is from New Zealand. Go is partly Canadian. Pascal and Modula-2 are Swiss. Scala is Swiss too. Lua is Brazilian. Ocaml is French.

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jnwatson2• 6 years ago

The Netherlands is Dutch, not Danish. And he's Dutch-American now (and Python was designed in the US).

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throwaway894345• 6 years ago

In fairness, while C++ was created by a Dane in America, anyone anywhere could request a feature addition to the language and it would be implemented, so I think C++ is truly an international language.

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esperent10• 6 years ago

Doesn't that apply to most modern languages? I know it does for JavaScript.

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bluedino• 6 years ago

And if you take UNIX to mean Linux, that was created by a Finn.

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gumby• 6 years ago

And the Ada example from the article describes a language adopted by and then heavily funded/legitimized by the US DoD (e.g. they funded GNU Ada, made it a requirement...)

Still, the article makes a useful point.

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chiefalchemist• 6 years ago

Perhaps. But the scope of article is in the title. And of course there are exceptions. While it's not always wise to generalize, it does make sense to look for patterns and follow arcs. That's seems to be the author's intent.

As for C++ and C#, maybe it wasn't the money. Maybe it was the culture that attracted them? Maybe they were Danes by DNA but they identified as American? If that's the case, they it's fair to say that those languages have deep American roots.

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lproven4• 6 years ago

Blogpost author/submitter here.

It's a fair point. It is not a blind spot -- I did think about it, but I don't think I have ever owned an Asian-designed computer or used Asian-designed software. Ditto African or Australian, FWIW.

I once owned a 2nd-hand Sony Ericsson P910, an early smartphone with the UIQ GUI -- but this was a Symbian device with a Swedish-designed UI. I'm honestly not sure how much input Sony had. And I have a Playstation 2. My tablet is Chinese, by a Chinese company (Chuwi), but it runs an American OS: Android. These are about as close as I can claim, sadly, so I am really not fit to comment or judge.

Whereas most of the world's electronics are partly or totally manufactured in Asia, it's mostly by or for American- or European-owned companies.

I am aware of many fascinating Japanese computers and similar devices, from the FM Towns to the Pomera e-ink portable word-processors, to the MSX2 and MSX2 Turbo-R computers, which interest me greatly and I'd like to have -- but I don't.

The Julia programming language (AIUI, an Indian project) looks fascinating, but I am a poor programmer and old enough to find learning new languages extremely hard -- not something I would do as a leisure activity. So I have never tried it myself.

There is no lack of creativity there, certainly. There is a huge amount. It is just that little of it seems to directly influence the world market elsewhere.

Why that is the case is a fascinating question that I am ill-equipped to address.

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esperent10• 6 years ago

Whereas most of the world's electronics are partly or totally manufactured in Asia, it's mostly by or for American- or European-owned companies.

Do you have a source for this claim? I suspect it's incorrect, especially once you stop focusing quite so strongly on CPUs and programming languages and start considering everything that goes into a computer or mobile device such as RAM and networking, not to mention displays, which are just as important as the CPU.

It is just that little of it seems to directly influence the world market elsewhere.

In the country where you live, maybe. Aren't the Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean, and so on, markets part of the world market?

Maybe I have a different perspective on things since I live in Vietnam. But your article comes across as kind of myopic to me.

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knolax7• 6 years ago

Whereas most of the world's electronics are partly or totally manufactured in Asia, it's mostly by or for American- or European-owned companies.

Top Personal Computer Vendor in 2019 by Market Share is Lenovo[0]

Top Mobile Phone Vendors by Market Share in 2020 Q1 is Samsung, Followed by Huawei [1]

Top Games Console vendor is Sony [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...

[1] https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/vendor

[2] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181129005477/en/Nin...

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nitrogen• 6 years ago

Just a couple more random examples of international sources of influential technology: the Ruby language comes from Japan, and has had a pretty wide influence. Lua is from Brazil.

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thehappypm• 6 years ago

You don't need to apologize. Not every blog post needs to include every culture on earth in equal representation.

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shard2• 6 years ago

Note that for non-Pixel Android phones, the Android that it is running is only part of the picture, and is permeated with non-Google code. The hardware driver code (BSP, or Board Support Package) is an external part; custom frameworks or libraries to support product specific features such as special camera configurations or AI accelerators; custom apps such as photo apps, dialers, gallery, etc; themes such as Oxygen OS or One UI; cloud services that connect to custom apps. Your Chinese tablet might be from a smaller company which does not provide many of the above, but leading Android phone companies have large SW teams which develop these SW for their products.

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rurban• 6 years ago

The Julia programming language (AIUI, an Indian project)

Nope, Julia is MIT.

Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral Shah were all at MIT, under the patronage of Alan Edelman.

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bazooka_penguin3• 6 years ago

ARM is still mostly the same company, softbank just holds it. That said most of the recent uarchs were designed in Austin, TX and the next gen A78 and X1 will be too. And ATI hasn't been Canadian in over a decade. The current graphics division of AMD, which used to be ATI, is headquartered in Shanghai in AMD's Asia HQ.

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moonbug• 6 years ago

Liam was referring to Acorn.

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pjc504• 6 years ago

If you look inside any modern laptop or smartphone you'll find that most it was manufactured in Asia, and that the software and hardware design was split between many different countries and continents, and that the actual people doing the work are even more diverse.

Indeed. It takes a civilisation to make an iPhone. Many US multinationals have EU development divisions of one sort or another. Dublin is doing very well out of FAANG at the moment.

Where are the owners? Well, if it's a publicly quoted company, they're all over the world.

Where are the corporate taxes paid? Staff salaries and sales taxes are paid locally. But profits can be routed to the cheapest jurisdiction, so Apple is technically an Irish company when it comes to profit accounting, on which they pay almost no tax (see Ireland v European Commission (Apple Sales International) (Cases T-778/16 and T-892/16) (15 July 2020))

Perhaps the real question is, "When the nationalists come for you for displaying insufficient loyalty, which jurisdiction do you end up in?" The barrier between US and China is gradually being raised again.

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spacehunt3• 6 years ago

Little known fact: Motorola's Dragonball series of CPUs, used in the original Palm, was designed by Motorola's lab in Hong Kong.

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cryptonector• 6 years ago

Why would you assume that TFA might know and therefore should write about things they did not mention though?

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oaiey2• 6 years ago

Also not to forget: American business culture is focused on achieving your yearly bonus, means achieving your goals, means delivering the product you promised.

Many European places are focused on quality and feature richness. That produces delays and budget overruns.

As a consequence, American products are often first to market, get the attention and the money. And often, they just buy the competition who has not made it (European or not).

(and this is not only true for companies but also for managers within the same multi-national company).

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lewis1028282• 6 years ago

I’ve never seen such an incorrect statement in my life — have you ever been to Europe?

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Aeolun• 6 years ago

You mean products in Europe are not focused on quality and just garbage both in sales and time to market?

(I don’t necessarily think that)

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mikorym• 6 years ago

Ada, the fast type-safe compiled language (French)? Largely dead in the market.

Isn't this language used in the Eurofighter Typhoon?

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sgerenser• 6 years ago

I thought Ada was still fairly widely used in aviation software in general. Perhaps not in new designs?

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non-entity• 6 years ago

From what I've seen in job descriptions for various defense related positions Ada seems to be written in as a small "nice to have" and makes me imagine most of it is maintenance or being replaced (probably by C++ too lol)

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ycombinatorrio• 6 years ago

and some missile guidance system too

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Spearchucker3• 6 years ago

When focus is quality, quality rises and costs fall. When focus is cost, costs rise and quality falls. William Edwards Deming, an American, said that.

Whilst a lot of what Liam wrote rings very very true (I'm not Amercian either) I think it's slightly more nuanced. Windows Phone is a great example. Americans hate on Microsoft and so deprived themselves of the best mobile phone OS of ever. Even today Windows Phone is more usable, faster, more secure and better in almost every metric than Android. But Windows Phone is dead. Same with the Compaq IPaq. It too was American and amazing.

I went through the whole tech cycle Liam did (started programming in '84), and felt crushed every time another obviously superior product died. Apart from the iPaq, some highlights in the mobile space alone are the Nokia 9000 Communicator, the Nokia E90, the Nokia N900, and the best device (my opinion) I've ever experienced, the Nokia 1520.

Interesting that we as humans so often base our decisions on emotion rather than logic. I now use an Android phone and no longer bother with mobile apps. That sense of awe and wonder has been eviscerated, eaten up and spat back out.

Today's tech is throw-away. Watches, thermostats, tablets, light bulbs... Delivered by Amazon this morning, in the trash this afternoon, making space for yet another smart but shitty light bulb tomorrow.

I miss that child-like sense of excitement and wonder tech used to instill in me...

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anticristi2• 6 years ago

This.

I sometimes turned to my girlfriend while taking off in a plane (back in 2019 :P) and tell her: "OMFG! We realise humanities dream of flying!"

More examples from the comedian Louis CK: https://youtu.be/kBLkX2VaQs4

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pyentropy• 6 years ago

When Android started getting big, a huge community of enthusiasts were making cool proof of concepts. Port busybox, VNC, run Ubuntu on your phone, ROM customization.

Beginners started using accelerometers and multitouch to make innovative games. I remember tutorials on how to make algorithms for good gesture detection (gestures were a big thing).

Now app stores are worth almost trillion dollars. You can still find niche communities but just like with the Internet, it got too commercialized.

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FpUser2• 6 years ago

"I went through the whole tech cycle Liam did (started programming in '84), and felt crushed every time another obviously superior product died."

I myself feel like a walking death sentence. Every tech that I'd ever liked and considered superior had died or getting there. Shit wins.

As for smartphones/app store combo: I consider it a crime. People are dragging along powerful computers but instead of being able to use those in a creative way they're actively isolated from this type of usage.

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CopOnTheRun• 6 years ago

Americans hate on Microsoft and so deprived themselves of the best mobile phone OS of ever.

I don't think that's a correct assessment for most Americans' opinions towards Microsoft.¹ I also don't think that's the reason Windows Phone never took off. When compared to iOS and Android, Windows Phone just didn't have the app ecosystem to compel people to buy them.

1 https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21144680/verge-tech-survey...

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jiofih2• 6 years ago

Windows Phone just didn't have the app ecosystem

Which is also a shame cause currently we have a torrent of crap in both app stores and nobody really bothers. All WP would need today is Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Telegram and Maps to succeed.

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Spearchucker3• 6 years ago

I believe the assessment to be true. Windows Phone was doing really well in Europe. It was Americans who refused to write those WP apps that were so desperately wanted.

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talideon• 6 years ago

Windows Phone is a great example. Americans hate on Microsoft and so deprived themselves of the best mobile phone OS of ever. Even today Windows Phone is more usable, faster, more secure and better in almost every metric than Android. But Windows Phone is dead.

That's because Microsoft poisoned the well a long time ago. They might've spent a long time since Ballmer's departure cleaning up that superfund site and built a beautiful resort on it, memories persist.

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Spearchucker3• 6 years ago

You proved the point (see my 4th paragraph).

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pjc504• 6 years ago

Windows phone was great, but simply far too late to market. By that point it didn't matter whether it was better or not, the silos were built.

Deming is amazing as well. A real case of a prophet not honored in his own country, he's a big part of the success of post-war Japanese manufacturing.

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kanobo• 6 years ago

Europe seems to me to have good intentioned laws and norms that stifle computer related companies. 1) Very strong privacy laws and culture that make it difficult for startups to thrive 2) Business and bankruptcy structures that aren't as friendly to investors 3) More sensical valuing of companies and higher risk-aversion

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Uberphallus• 6 years ago

This thing of running a company into debt while growing userbase until someone figures out how to make money out of it is certainly not part of the culture.

That's what gave YouTube an edge over DailyMotion, they were pretty 50/50 in popularity in Europe before Google stepped in to monetize the thing. I certainly remember uploading videos to both platforms.

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bsder• 6 years ago

That's what gave YouTube an edge over DailyMotion, they were pretty 50/50 in popularity in Europe before Google stepped in to monetize the thing.

YouTube was flaming out until the boardroom backscratch between Sequoia and Google bailed them out.

YouTube was burning several million dollars a month on bandwidth and was facing down billions in legal fees--both of which were rapidly increasing. It was going to be bankrupt before the buyout. The buyout meant that Google could subsidize YouTube for a very long time.

It's also not at all clear that we wouldn't be better off if YouTube had actually gone bankrupt.

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growlist• 6 years ago

I'd suggest that in Europe innovation is stifled by a strange mix of very old vested interests, the class system (certainly here in the UK), socialistic cultural scepticism around capitalism/profit, and a cynical zero-sum mentality. Sadly I can only see the US going the same way what with the combination of ever-concentrated wealth for the lucky few, plus the faux-socialist destruction of the middle class which the Democrats seem to be working extremely hard at bringing about.

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dmm• 6 years ago

Use the most minimal, close-to-the-metal language that will work.

What? Javascript/Electron is super popular, way more popular than close-to-the-metal languages for desktop applications.

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FpUser2• 6 years ago

Not sure. I saw a lot of industrial applications and they're all native. No Electron there.

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sriku• 6 years ago

Ocaml - France? Erlang?

A heartbreaker for me is Mozart/Oz (Germany?) .. wish it was developed/used/taught more .. "pickling" (in python) came from M/Oz.

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catherd2• 6 years ago

There seem to be a lot of supporting arguments (look at all these dead projects he deems to have been fast, elegant, and efficient, also, hey, my current toys are not made for me to play with like I used to be able to, and the battery life sucks). But what is the actual thesis?

It seems like he wants hacker toys and is unhappy that everything is built for consumers now. I can't get anything deeper out of it.

The EU vs. US/Asia thing just seems like a weird proxy for saying real techies don't like extruded technology product but it's what the market asked for and now we have lots of it.

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jiofih2• 6 years ago

What makes you think the products he mentions were “hacker toys”? They were consumer products just the same.

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catherd2• 6 years ago

Some of them were consumer products. But they lost out (probably) because they were more like something a technical person would want and less like something made for a consumer.

Would you frame the reasons they failed differently? If TikTok users and gamers needed long battery life and elegant scripting tools we would have them. But they don't.

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4cao• 6 years ago

I think there is an interesting question here but I'm not sure I follow the train of thought.

First of all, I doubt that whatever happened relatively recently with regard to certain design choices in hardware and software is related in any way to how different implementations of BASIC fared against one another in the 1980s. Regardless of the conclusions, there are simply too few people involved in making these choices now that also know what the situation was then.

As a matter of fact, one of the perpetual problems in the field seems to be that so many already identified problems with certain design choices and solutions to them are being forgotten, and have to be rediscovered again by every new generation of programmers.

And I'm not sure how all this can be framed into the Europe vs America debate: most of the big things happen in the US. Arguably, having a huge single market and less regulatory overhead helps but it's also because this is where the financing is. However, there are people from all around the world working on these things, so to what extent the final outcome can be called "American" is debatable. The founder of Commodore himself was a European Holocaust survivor. And we really have to be careful lavishing praise on "elegant" and "efficient" European products lest we forget about whom to hold responsible for monstrosities like Systemd. Could it be just that we tend to remember the most succesful products from the past, and those originating outside the US had to meet a higher bar to become so?

Perhaps there is an argument to be made that at some point while stuff in Europe was still being "built to last," American businesses have already been discovering the allure of planned obsolescence. This would pertain to the hardware side of course. As far as the software is concerned, I think everybody just got lazy the moment they could get away with it due to the rapid advancement in hardware performance. So from the era where you could have Jet Set Willy or Dynamite Dan (platform games with dozens of levels) fit in 48 kB, we've now "developed" ourselves into a corner where even winver.exe (a program whose sole purpose is to display the Windows version and an "OK" button) takes more than this (56 kB on my system).

While I concur this outcome is not desirable, I can't really agree it happened because of "moving close to the metal." On the contrary, I think this was only possible because of moving away from it, one layer of abstraction away at a time. To paraphrase the quote attributed to Churchill, BASICs of the future will no longer call themselves BASICs but I think if a BASIC was being invented today, it would look like another JS and it would be part of the problem, not the solution.

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lproven4• 6 years ago

(Blogpost author/submitter here.)

It's a fair cop. It was only a blog post, dashed off on the basis of a FB comment that grew overlong. :-)

I do not have a coherent thesis that I was expounding; it was merely a passing thought.

I find it interesting, though, how the computer market has developed in my lifetime -- I first touched a computer keyboard in about 1981 and owned my own a year later.

In the early 1980s there were dozens of different manufacturers of almost-totally different and incompatible systems, and it was quite normal for the larger developed countries to have one or more indigenous computer makers, often with their own architectures. Most used one of a small number of CPUs, yes, and those CPUs were mostly American, yes, but I knew of English, Welsh, French, Spanish, German, Norwegian, and Swedish makes of computer, to pick the first few to come to mind. I'm sure there were many more.

Now I live in the former Communist Bloc, I've also learned of hordes of Sinclair clones and other copies of Western home computers that thrived over here, often after they were dead and gone from their homelands. I covet a Didaktik Kompakt. :-)

By the 1990s things were starting to consolidate but there was still a lot of variety, and major innovations came from other countries -- as other commenters note, from Denmark, from a Brit at CERN, from a Swedish-speaking Finn, etc. As I said in the piece, I used a Finnish cellphone with a British OS, and so on.

But when the world market consolidated down to a handful of companies and technologies, the winners were pretty much all American. The European software luminaries relocated their and often became American.

And yes, I think the overall design ethos has changed as a result, and I find that interesting. I have rarely seen it discussed. I often see people bemoaning modern bloatware, but I rarely see analysis of why and how it happened. This was my 2¢ worth on the subject.

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Rochus• 6 years ago

Ada, the fast type-safe compiled language (French)? Largely dead in the market.

Well, Ada was the language of choice of the US DoD from 1983 to about 1994. And it's only dead if you ignore the millions of code lines (old and new) produced in aerospace and defence.

The Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon family, ... Largely dead.

Well, Pascal and it's decendants (Delphi, etc.) are still in wide use with good tool support; obviously not in the author's field of sight here either.

Nokia's elegant, long-life, feature-rich devices ...

Sunk by an American u-boat in the prime of its life.

Asians or Europeans are also behind many so-called American inventions. Anyway, I don't understand what the author is trying to get at.

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masswerk2• 6 years ago

Anyway, I don't understand what the author is trying to get at.

It's about paradigms in technology deployment.

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zwieback• 6 years ago

I grew up in Germany during the home computer boom in the 80s and there was a definite anti-computer vibe at the time, my classmates thought I was contributing to the destruction of the high culture that was so superior to the US. Even though there were many cool platforms I think ultimately the pro-tech and pro-business atmosphere in the US drove the smaller competitors in Europe out of business.

Which isn't to say that European companies aren't strong in some areas. Here at hp we love STM32 micros (French/Italian), German robotics and automation equipment, optical equipment and of course ARM, which is a direct outgrowth of the pioneering European micro culture.

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pjc504• 6 years ago

I'm surprised and disappointed that was the prevailing culture in Germany, which is famous for its engineering culture; I guess that's limited to mechanical engineering?

The British microcomputer boom had a huge boost from a classic "dirigiste" state direction, involving the BBC producing a TV series to educate the public and a matching computer to work along at home with. That led to Sophie Wilson being hired straight out of Cambridge to produce it, and ultimately to ARM.

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wink• 6 years ago

100% - if you look at the landscape now, everything digital is still pretty much new and not working ("Das Internet ist für uns Neuland" in 2013).

Broadband is worse than in other countries, government interaction is pretty much non-digital and other things (there recently was a big thread about a government game development grant that was so startup-adverse that the person telling the story was lucky to not have been bankrupted) and it goes on and on. Also remember all the pixelated houses in Google maps? I wanted to look something up yesterday, image was made in 2008 and everything is pixelated.

Despite working in tech I don't see Germany in any sort of leading role in anything digital or IT and this won't change.

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AnimalMuppet4• 6 years ago

The Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon family, a fast garbage-collected compiled family

Pascal wasn't garbage-collected, was it? At least not in the original form.

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jhoechtl• 6 years ago

There is much truth told but

Nokia's elegant, long-life, feature-rich devices, the company who popularised first the cellphowe and then the smartphone? Now rebadges Chinese/American kit.

As someone who paod a lot for these early smartphones (N80, N800) they were highly inconsistent. Maybe ahead of it's time but when the iPhone hit the market Nokia quickly lost it's share for good reasons.

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nn3• 6 years ago

His examples have so many mistakes, it's hard to take anything in this seriously.

- Ada (French). Ada is not french, it was developed for the US DOD. I also wouldn't call it dead.

- Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon: ... garbage collected ...: Neither Pascal nor Modula-2 are garbage collected. Modula-2 and Oberon are probably dead, but Pascal in its modern iterations is very alive and still widely used, apart from having a significant legacy.

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GeorgeTirebiter• 6 years ago

I do have anecdotal evidence for this (probably incendiary, but certainly not intended that way) point of view: Europeans tend to love creating and mastering complexity; Americans at their best despise complexity and produce simple approaches that cover most of the use-cases. (Also, the author doesn't mention the HP 200LX PDA - a full DOS box, CGA on which I have running a C compiler, scheme48, RF design s/w and much more. Still works great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX)

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elchin• 6 years ago

A professor in my grad school told me once "In US if you try to create a business and you fail, people will think you're entrepreneurial. In Europe they'll think you're incompetent".

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Thoughts about the difference between European and American H/W and S/W design

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