4 ms·

It also illustrates how far behind the Japanese are in terms of software.

• e12e 12y ago
  Yeah, they even have their own hopelessly slow scripting language smalltalk clone that hardly anyone uses, except for some amateur hypertext hipsters. I mean, who here have heard of this language, ruby? /s
  • w1ntermute 12y ago
    Predictably, Ruby is the first thing anyone brings up on HN when someone makes a point about how backwards the Japanese software scene is. But if you'd spent any time in the Japanese tech scene, you'd know that Ruby is not very popular in its country of birth, and if you'd spent any time learning about its creator (a Mormon with 4 children), you'd know that he's far from the norm when it comes to Japanese people.
    • e12e 12y ago
      Aren't most creators of popular languages outliers? As you've guessed I'm not very familiar with the day-to-day of programming in Japan -- but my impression was that in the average day-to-day of enterprise programming, the whole world tends to be "behind"? I must admit, off the top of my head the projects that come to mind when thinking about Japan and programming are Ruby, Nilfs2, TOMOYO MACs for Linux and game/system development (Sony PS3/Nintendo etc) -- and more recently Shougo's[1] vim plugins. I have a "host-family" cousin that was studying at a vocational college in the late 90s, learning game development, and I recall he complained that learning c++ (as a first language) was hard. But that seemed kind of standard for game dev anywhere at the time. I admit, I have a knee-jerk negative reaction when someone generalizes across an entire nation without much explanation. [1] https://github.com/Shougo https://github.com/Shougo