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by joshdavham 635 days ago
It makes sense that most software innovation has so far happened in the USA, Europe and Japan, but I wonder what this map might look like by the end of the century...
3 comments

I think there is likely also bias in the data (what was considered significant) and inaccuracies in locations (many things assigned to Google’s head office).
In the US at least, programming languages were either developed by large corporations (Sun Microsystems, Apple, Google, Bell Labs, IBM) or research institutions (MIT) or Government (Ada, COBOL).
Ada was designed at Honeywell-Bull in France.
“Ada was originally designed by a team led by French computer scientist Jean Ichbiah of Honeywell under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983.”

This thread was about individuals making languages on their own and my point in this thread is most popular programming languages didn’t gain ground or mature until paid for and sponsored by an org or company.

DoD paid for it and can take credit for developing it.

> but I wonder what this map might look like by the end of the century...

Why would it suddenly change?

Well for one, the world demography is deeply changing with population aging everywhere but a significant lag between countries which are already greying (Japan, Europe), countries which rely heavily on immigration to keep the median age stable (the USA) and countries which are just beginning to age but have large population (India, China, Brazil).
Old people don't innovate? Sounds like an ageist stereotype.
Questions about whole population groups like these are best understood not through stereotypes or anti-stereotypes but through statistics.

I found this study [0] that examines the relationship between age and things like winning the Nobel prize or coming up with a "great invention".

Looks like there's a peak in the late 30s and that peak is slowly creeping up as the population ages.

But it might also be that you need a population of 20-year-olds to actually adopt the new inventions.

[0] https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/jones-ben/htm/a...

Retired people don't innovate, simply because they don't work.
Most old people don’t work and a significant portion of them can’t. If you really think an aging population doesn’t have an impact on a country overall output, I have a bridge to sell you.