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This article has a huge cultural blind spot. What about Asia? Probably most of the hardware in your phone was designed in Asia. Arm, originally from the UK, is now Japanese owned. ATI is Canadian, which also doesn't get a mention.

When it comes to programming languages, C++ and C# were both created by Danes, although they were working in the US at the time. Presumably because that's where the money was. Does that mean the US gets to claim these languages?

Personally, I think it just invalidates the whole argument of what is American and what is European. Creation of modern tech is a global effort. If you look inside any modern laptop or smartphone you'll find that most it was manufactured in Asia, and that the software and hardware design was split between many different countries and continents, and that the actual people doing the work are even more diverse.

Blogpost author/submitter here.

It's a fair point. It is not a blind spot -- I did think about it, but I don't think I have ever owned an Asian-designed computer or used Asian-designed software. Ditto African or Australian, FWIW.

I once owned a 2nd-hand Sony Ericsson P910, an early smartphone with the UIQ GUI -- but this was a Symbian device with a Swedish-designed UI. I'm honestly not sure how much input Sony had. And I have a Playstation 2. My tablet is Chinese, by a Chinese company (Chuwi), but it runs an American OS: Android. These are about as close as I can claim, sadly, so I am really not fit to comment or judge.

Whereas most of the world's electronics are partly or totally manufactured in Asia, it's mostly by or for American- or European-owned companies.

I am aware of many fascinating Japanese computers and similar devices, from the FM Towns to the Pomera e-ink portable word-processors, to the MSX2 and MSX2 Turbo-R computers, which interest me greatly and I'd like to have -- but I don't.

The Julia programming language (AIUI, an Indian project) looks fascinating, but I am a poor programmer and old enough to find learning new languages extremely hard -- not something I would do as a leisure activity. So I have never tried it myself.

There is no lack of creativity there, certainly. There is a huge amount. It is just that little of it seems to directly influence the world market elsewhere.

Why that is the case is a fascinating question that I am ill-equipped to address.

I am speculating here, but I think the US was among the first to realise that access to state-of-the-art computing is a national security issue. Therefore, the US government essentially subsidized IT R&D (e.g. Silicon valley, this is confirmed by Wikipedia) giving the US a huge heads up to the fragmented EU granting/capital (and likely Asian, but I don't know) landscape. Therefore, we now live in a legacy where, although tech is a global phenomenon, it is largely controlled by US capital, with other players (EU, CN, JP) playing catch-up.
In fairness, while C++ was created by a Dane in America, anyone anywhere could request a feature addition to the language and it would be implemented, so I think C++ is truly an international language.
ARM is still mostly the same company, softbank just holds it. That said most of the recent uarchs were designed in Austin, TX and the next gen A78 and X1 will be too. And ATI hasn't been Canadian in over a decade. The current graphics division of AMD, which used to be ATI, is headquartered in Shanghai in AMD's Asia HQ.
> Probably most of the hardware in your phone was designed in Asia

It doesn’t appear to be true at all for Apple phones: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+11+Pro+Max+Teardown/1...

> Presumably because that's where the money was. Does that mean the US gets to claim these languages?

I mean I don’t think it really matters but if they moved to the US because the US economy was valuing those things then it’s the product of the American economy from a economic point of view.

> If you look inside any modern laptop or smartphone you'll find that most it was manufactured in Asia, and that the software and hardware design was split between many different countries and continents, and that the actual people doing the work are even more diverse.

Indeed. It takes a civilisation to make an iPhone. Many US multinationals have EU development divisions of one sort or another. Dublin is doing very well out of FAANG at the moment.

Where are the owners? Well, if it's a publicly quoted company, they're all over the world.

Where are the corporate taxes paid? Staff salaries and sales taxes are paid locally. But profits can be routed to the cheapest jurisdiction, so Apple is technically an Irish company when it comes to profit accounting, on which they pay almost no tax (see Ireland v European Commission (Apple Sales International) (Cases T-778/16 and T-892/16) (15 July 2020))

Perhaps the real question is, "When the nationalists come for you for displaying insufficient loyalty, which jurisdiction do you end up in?" The barrier between US and China is gradually being raised again.

Perhaps. But the scope of article is in the title. And of course there are exceptions. While it's not always wise to generalize, it does make sense to look for patterns and follow arcs. That's seems to be the author's intent.

As for C++ and C#, maybe it wasn't the money. Maybe it was the culture that attracted them? Maybe they were Danes by DNA but they identified as American? If that's the case, they it's fair to say that those languages have deep American roots.

Yep. Ruby came from Japan, Ruby on Rails came from Denmark. Guido van Rossum is from Netherlands. Rasmus Lerdorf if Danish-Canadian. What's it about Danes and languages? :)
Little known fact: Motorola's Dragonball series of CPUs, used in the original Palm, was designed by Motorola's lab in Hong Kong.
Why would you assume that TFA might know and therefore should write about things they did not mention though?
This seems to be a list of things that Europe used to have. Here's some counterpoints that you might be thinking of:

The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.

The best selling CPUs (ARM) are ultimately of British origin.

The Web was created by a Brit at CERN (Switzerland).

Raspberry Pis are quite popular, and British. (Also has an ARM CPU, and often runs Linux, sometimes with a web server. Nifty!)

And the other small hobbyist computing platform, Arduino, is Italian;

Python was created by a Dutch programmer;

PHP, the much maligned bastard language that still runs most of the web, was created by a Danish Canadian.

Even from his own examples, Ada and Pascal (as in Delphi) are still widely used, though probably in limited circles.

Skype: founded by a Swede and a Dane, coded by Estonians. MySQL: a Finn and a Swede.
The web ? We had minitel in France.
> The most popular form of UNIX (Linux) got started in Finland.

By a Finnish guy that moved to the US (and is a US citizen)

> The best selling CPUs (ARM) are ultimately of British origin.

The instruction set for the cpus originated in Britain (now japan), the cpu design is almost all based in the US (Qualcomm, Broadcom, Apple).

> The Web was created by a Brit at CERN (Switzerland).

The web was started by a Brit yes, the internet started long before in the US.

> Raspberry Pis are quite popular, and British.

True

I grew up in Germany during the home computer boom in the 80s and there was a definite anti-computer vibe at the time, my classmates thought I was contributing to the destruction of the high culture that was so superior to the US. Even though there were many cool platforms I think ultimately the pro-tech and pro-business atmosphere in the US drove the smaller competitors in Europe out of business.

Which isn't to say that European companies aren't strong in some areas. Here at hp we love STM32 micros (French/Italian), German robotics and automation equipment, optical equipment and of course ARM, which is a direct outgrowth of the pioneering European micro culture.

I'm surprised and disappointed that was the prevailing culture in Germany, which is famous for its engineering culture; I guess that's limited to mechanical engineering?

The British microcomputer boom had a huge boost from a classic "dirigiste" state direction, involving the BBC producing a TV series to educate the public and a matching computer to work along at home with. That led to Sophie Wilson being hired straight out of Cambridge to produce it, and ultimately to ARM.

> Ada, the fast type-safe compiled language (French)? Largely dead in the market.

Well, Ada was the language of choice of the US DoD from 1983 to about 1994. And it's only dead if you ignore the millions of code lines (old and new) produced in aerospace and defence.

> The Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon family, ... Largely dead.

Well, Pascal and it's decendants (Delphi, etc.) are still in wide use with good tool support; obviously not in the author's field of sight here either.

> Nokia's elegant, long-life, feature-rich devices ...

Sunk by an American u-boat in the prime of its life.

Asians or Europeans are also behind many so-called American inventions. Anyway, I don't understand what the author is trying to get at.

> Anyway, I don't understand what the author is trying to get at.

It's about paradigms in technology deployment.

When focus is quality, quality rises and costs fall. When focus is cost, costs rise and quality falls. William Edwards Deming, an American, said that.

Whilst a lot of what Liam wrote rings very very true (I'm not Amercian either) I think it's slightly more nuanced. Windows Phone is a great example. Americans hate on Microsoft and so deprived themselves of the best mobile phone OS of ever. Even today Windows Phone is more usable, faster, more secure and better in almost every metric than Android. But Windows Phone is dead. Same with the Compaq IPaq. It too was American and amazing.

I went through the whole tech cycle Liam did (started programming in '84), and felt crushed every time another obviously superior product died. Apart from the iPaq, some highlights in the mobile space alone are the Nokia 9000 Communicator, the Nokia E90, the Nokia N900, and the best device (my opinion) I've ever experienced, the Nokia 1520.

Interesting that we as humans so often base our decisions on emotion rather than logic. I now use an Android phone and no longer bother with mobile apps. That sense of awe and wonder has been eviscerated, eaten up and spat back out.

Today's tech is throw-away. Watches, thermostats, tablets, light bulbs... Delivered by Amazon this morning, in the trash this afternoon, making space for yet another smart but shitty light bulb tomorrow.

I miss that child-like sense of excitement and wonder tech used to instill in me...

> Americans hate on Microsoft and so deprived themselves of the best mobile phone OS of ever.

I don't think that's a correct assessment for most Americans' opinions towards Microsoft.¹ I also don't think that's the reason Windows Phone never took off. When compared to iOS and Android, Windows Phone just didn't have the app ecosystem to compel people to buy them.

1 https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21144680/verge-tech-survey...

Windows phone was great, but simply far too late to market. By that point it didn't matter whether it was better or not, the silos were built.

Deming is amazing as well. A real case of a prophet not honored in his own country, he's a big part of the success of post-war Japanese manufacturing.

> Windows Phone is a great example. Americans hate on Microsoft and so deprived themselves of the best mobile phone OS of ever. Even today Windows Phone is more usable, faster, more secure and better in almost every metric than Android. But Windows Phone is dead.

That's because Microsoft poisoned the well a long time ago. They might've spent a long time since Ballmer's departure cleaning up that superfund site and built a beautiful resort on it, memories persist.

When Android started getting big, a huge community of enthusiasts were making cool proof of concepts. Port busybox, VNC, run Ubuntu on your phone, ROM customization.

Beginners started using accelerometers and multitouch to make innovative games. I remember tutorials on how to make algorithms for good gesture detection (gestures were a big thing).

Now app stores are worth almost trillion dollars. You can still find niche communities but just like with the Internet, it got too commercialized.

> "I went through the whole tech cycle Liam did (started programming in '84), and felt crushed every time another obviously superior product died."

I myself feel like a walking death sentence. Every tech that I'd ever liked and considered superior had died or getting there. Shit wins.

As for smartphones/app store combo: I consider it a crime. People are dragging along powerful computers but instead of being able to use those in a creative way they're actively isolated from this type of usage.

This.

I sometimes turned to my girlfriend while taking off in a plane (back in 2019 :P) and tell her: "OMFG! We realise humanities dream of flying!"

More examples from the comedian Louis CK: https://youtu.be/kBLkX2VaQs4

> And I think a big reason is that Europe was poorer, so product development was all about efficiency, cost-reduction, high performance and sparing use of resources. The result was very fast, efficient products.

While Europe is poorer, the issue is not a focus on fast/efficient products... rather that US companies have access to incredible amounts of "dumb money" via pension funds that they can use to simply flatten (or buy up) any European competition. Either via outright price dumping (Uber), via lobbying efforts (Microsoft), by marketing (Apple) or by having access to way more R&D resources than European companies (Apple again).

A professor in my grad school told me once "In US if you try to create a business and you fail, people will think you're entrepreneurial. In Europe they'll think you're incompetent".
Ocaml - France? Erlang?

A heartbreaker for me is Mozart/Oz (Germany?) .. wish it was developed/used/taught more .. "pickling" (in python) came from M/Oz.

His examples have so many mistakes, it's hard to take anything in this seriously.

- Ada (French). Ada is not french, it was developed for the US DOD. I also wouldn't call it dead.

- Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon: ... garbage collected ...: Neither Pascal nor Modula-2 are garbage collected. Modula-2 and Oberon are probably dead, but Pascal in its modern iterations is very alive and still widely used, apart from having a significant legacy.

> The Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon family, a fast garbage-collected compiled family

Pascal wasn't garbage-collected, was it? At least not in the original form.

> Ada, the fast type-safe compiled language (French)? Largely dead in the market.

Isn't this language used in the Eurofighter Typhoon?

I thought Ada was still fairly widely used in aviation software in general. Perhaps not in new designs?
and some missile guidance system too
I do have anecdotal evidence for this (probably incendiary, but certainly not intended that way) point of view: Europeans tend to love creating and mastering complexity; Americans at their best despise complexity and produce simple approaches that cover most of the use-cases. (Also, the author doesn't mention the HP 200LX PDA - a full DOS box, CGA on which I have running a C compiler, scheme48, RF design s/w and much more. Still works great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX)
Europe seems to me to have good intentioned laws and norms that stifle computer related companies. 1) Very strong privacy laws and culture that make it difficult for startups to thrive 2) Business and bankruptcy structures that aren't as friendly to investors 3) More sensical valuing of companies and higher risk-aversion
This thing of running a company into debt while growing userbase until someone figures out how to make money out of it is certainly not part of the culture.

That's what gave YouTube an edge over DailyMotion, they were pretty 50/50 in popularity in Europe before Google stepped in to monetize the thing. I certainly remember uploading videos to both platforms.

I'd suggest that in Europe innovation is stifled by a strange mix of very old vested interests, the class system (certainly here in the UK), socialistic cultural scepticism around capitalism/profit, and a cynical zero-sum mentality. Sadly I can only see the US going the same way what with the combination of ever-concentrated wealth for the lucky few, plus the faux-socialist destruction of the middle class which the Democrats seem to be working extremely hard at bringing about.
I think the oversight in this article is the survivor bias regarding American designs. There were plenty of those fast, efficient designs from American developers but they too died in the avalanche of big-team giants.
I also think it severely underestimates the advantage of having such a large internal market.

Having access to a large internal market allows you to grow to a fairly large size while still only serving that internal market. Then, when you want to expand abroad, you're likely in a much better financial position to take on the expenses of dealing with lots various local laws and regulations.

I don't doubt you, I just don't know of many, so some examples please?
> Use the most minimal, close-to-the-metal language that will work.

What? Javascript/Electron is super popular, way more popular than close-to-the-metal languages for desktop applications.

Not sure. I saw a lot of industrial applications and they're all native. No Electron there.
There seem to be a lot of supporting arguments (look at all these dead projects he deems to have been fast, elegant, and efficient, also, hey, my current toys are not made for me to play with like I used to be able to, and the battery life sucks). But what is the actual thesis?

It seems like he wants hacker toys and is unhappy that everything is built for consumers now. I can't get anything deeper out of it.

The EU vs. US/Asia thing just seems like a weird proxy for saying real techies don't like extruded technology product but it's what the market asked for and now we have lots of it.

There is much truth told but

> Nokia's elegant, long-life, feature-rich devices, the company who popularised first the cellphowe and then the smartphone? Now rebadges Chinese/American kit.

As someone who paod a lot for these early smartphones (N80, N800) they were highly inconsistent. Maybe ahead of it's time but when the iPhone hit the market Nokia quickly lost it's share for good reasons.

I think there is an interesting question here but I'm not sure I follow the train of thought.

First of all, I doubt that whatever happened relatively recently with regard to certain design choices in hardware and software is related in any way to how different implementations of BASIC fared against one another in the 1980s. Regardless of the conclusions, there are simply too few people involved in making these choices now that also know what the situation was then.

As a matter of fact, one of the perpetual problems in the field seems to be that so many already identified problems with certain design choices and solutions to them are being forgotten, and have to be rediscovered again by every new generation of programmers.

And I'm not sure how all this can be framed into the Europe vs America debate: most of the big things happen in the US. Arguably, having a huge single market and less regulatory overhead helps but it's also because this is where the financing is. However, there are people from all around the world working on these things, so to what extent the final outcome can be called "American" is debatable. The founder of Commodore himself was a European Holocaust survivor. And we really have to be careful lavishing praise on "elegant" and "efficient" European products lest we forget about whom to hold responsible for monstrosities like Systemd. Could it be just that we tend to remember the most succesful products from the past, and those originating outside the US had to meet a higher bar to become so?

Perhaps there is an argument to be made that at some point while stuff in Europe was still being "built to last," American businesses have already been discovering the allure of planned obsolescence. This would pertain to the hardware side of course. As far as the software is concerned, I think everybody just got lazy the moment they could get away with it due to the rapid advancement in hardware performance. So from the era where you could have Jet Set Willy or Dynamite Dan (platform games with dozens of levels) fit in 48 kB, we've now "developed" ourselves into a corner where even winver.exe (a program whose sole purpose is to display the Windows version and an "OK" button) takes more than this (56 kB on my system).

While I concur this outcome is not desirable, I can't really agree it happened because of "moving close to the metal." On the contrary, I think this was only possible because of moving away from it, one layer of abstraction away at a time. To paraphrase the quote attributed to Churchill, BASICs of the future will no longer call themselves BASICs but I think if a BASIC was being invented today, it would look like another JS and it would be part of the problem, not the solution.

Also not to forget: American business culture is focused on achieving your yearly bonus, means achieving your goals, means delivering the product you promised.

Many European places are focused on quality and feature richness. That produces delays and budget overruns.

As a consequence, American products are often first to market, get the attention and the money. And often, they just buy the competition who has not made it (European or not).

(and this is not only true for companies but also for managers within the same multi-national company).