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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
by esperent 6y 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.
- creddit 6y 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/126000 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+11+Pro+Max+Teardown/1...
- gambiting 6y agoApple devices are a tiny minority on the broader scale. https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share/ https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...
- creddit 6y agoIs it even true for the Asian designed phones that the majority of the hardware is designed in Asia? https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+S20+Ultra+Teardown/131607 https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+S20+Ultra+Tea... LOTS of Qualcomm ICs as well as Skyworks, Qorvo and Maxim which are all US companies.
- shard 6y agoIf you consider display/battery/cameras/mechanicals, then by weight/volume/cost, most of the phone is designed in Asia.
- esperent 6y agoMost iPhones are made in China with parts manufactured by FoxConn. Maybe it's different for US iPhones?
- mc32 6y agoMade aka manufactured is not the same as designed. Which I don’t think they mean the ICs themselves but rather the whole phone package. Some are designed in S Korea, some in Japan, some China, some the US some in Scandinavia.
- creddit 6y agoLook at the link I posted. The vast majority of ICs are US designed.
- mc32 6y agoI agree with you. So when the poster I’m replying to says “made with parts” in China, I think they mean designing the pcb the bom. Which isn’t true as many of these are designed elsewhere but assembled in China (though some are designed there too) But it’s also not about assembly or design of the ICs themselves.
- creddit 6y agoThey are assembled in China. FoxConn doesn’t even do the majority of the manufacture of the parts. Their primary role is assembly.
- jjcon 6y 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.
- lubonay 6y agoI 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.
- esperent 6y agoI was not trying to say they are Danish or American. My point is that they are neither.
- adventured 6y agoIf they were created in the US, then they're American, either in part or in whole. You might as well pretend SpaceX isn't American either, because Elon is from South Africa. And Nvidia isn't American, because Jensen Huang is from Taiwan. Google is half Russian because Sergey Brin was born in Moscow.
- anticristi 6y agoI 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.
- rimliu 6y agoYep. 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? :)
- wenc 6y agoSince 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.
- lproven 6y ago(Blogpost author/submitter here.) A small objection: Java came out of Sun, a Californian company. It would seem to me to be as American as Solaris, NeWS, SMF or vi. No?
- 3pt14159 6y agoHonestly, I'm a Canadian. We're much like Americans when it comes to software. A little bit less of a offensive security community but for almost everything else it's pretty even.
- DonaldFisk 6y agoProlog and Ada are also French.
- jnwatson 6y agoThe Netherlands is Dutch, not Danish. And he's Dutch-American now (and Python was designed in the US).
- markus92 6y agoI thought Python was designed at the CWI in Amsterdam. At least that's what Guido's linkedin says.
- throwaway894345 6y agoIn 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.
- esperent 6y agoDoesn't that apply to most modern languages? I know it does for JavaScript.
- kjeetgill 6y agoI think it was (mostly) just a joke about how many language features C++ has by implying they've never turned down a feature request.
- JavatheHat 6y agoThat one was born on a conference center toilet. I find the assigning of creators only to be meaningful for those who can't create..
- bluedino 6y agoAnd if you take UNIX to mean Linux, that was created by a Finn.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoAnd if you don't take UNIX to mean (only) Linux, then it was created at Bell Labs, and not by a Finn.
- RealStickman_ 6y agoCan UNIX even mean Linux? I usually hear Linux described as UNIX-like.
- gumby 6y agoAnd 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.
- chiefalchemist 6y agoPerhaps. 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.
- lproven 6y agoBlogpost 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.
- esperent 6y 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.
- lproven 6y agoBy all means please do educate me on what I am not seeing. I once saw a British OS, Symbian, used around the world. I saw a Finnish company's phones used around the world. A little British computer maker designed what's still the most popular CPU architecture, ARM, but the company is long dead. I understand many of the world's hard disks come from Thailand and Malaysia -- but from factories owned and run by Western Digital, Seagate, etc. Yes, every country is part of the world market, but the salient point is who manages to break out of their own national market. I am trying to think of Asian companies who make and sell computers or computer-related tech internationally. Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi... But they run American OSes and use American designs. Sony and Nintendo don't, but then they don't make CPUs or GPUs, do they? Sony's PCs run Windows, like the Japanese laptop vendors' do. When Sony made PDAs, they ran PalmOS; when Sanyo did, they ran Windows CE. American dominance was not so universal just 25y ago. Can we identify what happened? Is this all "worse is better"?
- bazooka_penguin 6y agoARM 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.
- moonbug 6y agoLiam was referring to Acorn.
- pjc50 6y 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.
- spacehunt 6y agoLittle known fact: Motorola's Dragonball series of CPUs, used in the original Palm, was designed by Motorola's lab in Hong Kong.
- cryptonector 6y agoWhy would you assume that TFA might know and therefore should write about things they did not mention though?