4 ms·
I would expand this to include the sciences. I did a 2 month industry internship in Japan a few years ago and I was blown away by the effects of the language ba
by blah32497 13y ago
I would expand this to include the sciences. I did a 2 month industry internship in Japan a few years ago and I was blown away by the effects of the language barrier. They are incredibly disconnected from the rest of the world. While the rest of the world is publishing their results in English, they are publishing in their own Japanese trade journals. It's kind of ironic, b/c in a less developed country (China), or a less populous country (European countries) you wouldn't have the local base to support the publishing of local language journals and technical books. So they're victims of their own success.
Sure they can go read an IEEE article, but 9/10 times they'll go to a Japanese source b/c it's so much easier for them.
For programming it's probably only worse. I imagine there is a Japanese equivalent to Stack Exchange, but it will have a tiny fraction of the help you get on the English language one. It's probably like programming in the 90s! =)
- rapind 13y agoWell Ruby came out of Japan. So in 1995 some of Japan's coders were programming like it was 2005.
- dead_phish 13y agoWell, one of Japan's coders. Matz was kind of revolutionary.
- msutherl 13y agoRuby isn't exactly revolutionary. See: Smalltalk. RoR, however, was.
- Pitarou 13y agoThis is an interesting case. A new programming language is a frail thing, and can only grow and prosper if it finds an unoccupied niche. Japan was the perfect environment for Ruby to develop until it was ready to take on the world. It's as if mammals evolved on an island without any dinosaurs, and then swam over to the mainland.
- ekianjo 13y agoMouahaha you killed your argument with this example. Matz is not really a typical Japanese. He is a mormont, he's fluent in English, and lived extensively overseas. There's almost no Japanese like him. So let's forget about this case.