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 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
