Problems of Symbol Congestion in Computer Languages

[Steven D'Aprano]

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.



-- 
Steven