Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by avindroth 1298 days ago
Is there a reason why some well-known Lisp hackers are Japanese? I noticed the devs of Kandria (radiance, etc.) as well as Fukamachi (woo, clack, mito, etc.), and am wondering what led to that kind of geographical distribution.
2 comments

  >  Is there a reason why some well-known Lisp hackers are Japanese?
Perhaps, they trained in the 5th gen computing environment begun in 1982 by Japan's MITI (Ministry of International Trade and Industry).

  "It aimed to create an "epoch-making computer" with supercomputer-like
   performance and to provide a platform for future developments in 
   artificial intelligence."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
Because it is a large country (Population = 124M) and it had already in the past a Lisp community.

Many years ago at an event I met people from a commercial Lisp vendor in California. They had also business cards in Japanese, because a bunch of customers came from there.