Problems of Symbol Congestion in Computer Languages

[Chris Jones]

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 06:40:17AM EST, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Feb 2011 02:50:11 -0500, Chris Jones wrote:

> > Always struck me as odd that a country like Japan for instance, with
> > all its achievements in the industrial realm, never came up with one
> > single major piece of software.

> I think you are badly misinformed.
> 
> The most widespread operating system in the world is not Windows. It's 
> something you've probably never heard of, from Japan, called TRON.
> 
> http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/31855.html
> http://web-japan.org/trends/science/sci030522.html
> 
> Japan had an ambitious, but sadly failed, "Fifth Generation Computing" 
> project:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer 
> http://vanemden.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/who-killed-prolog/
> 
> They did good work, but unfortunately were ahead of their time and the 
> project ended in failure.
> 
> Japan virtually *owns* the video game market. Yes, yes, Americans publish 
> a few high-profile first-person shooters. For every one of them, there's 
> about a thousand Japanese games that never leave the country.
> 
> There's no shortages of programming languages which have come out of 
> Japan:
> 
> http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/findlanguages.prx?id=jp&which=ByCountry
> http://no-sword.jp/blog/2006/12/programming-without-ascii.html
> 
> The one you're most likely to have used or at least know of is Ruby.

Food for thought.. Thanks much for the links..!

cj