Ruby on Rails is not a unique programming language. Matz created Ruby.

you're right of course. I thought I'd include it though since its so popular.

> Ruby on Rails is not a unique programming language. Matz created Ruby.

What does "not a unique programming language" mean? Perhaps 'discrete' or 'distinct' in place of 'unique'? As not an RoR developer, I'm hardly in a position to say, but surely at a certain point a DSL deserves to be called a language in its own right. (Extreme case (that, I realise, is far past what anyone would call a DSL): Perl, as with many other languages, is written in C, but certainly counts as a separate programming language.)

EDIT, in response to two downvotes: surely it's a legitimate question? I genuinely don't know what it means to say that something isn't unique (except mathematically, that it means that there's more than one of it). Assuming that it means what it seems to mean, how does one draw the line that I mentioned?

Rails is not a porgramming language, for various pedantic reasons. That doesn't make your idea bad. Rails is a defined pattern of expressing a program, conceptually similar to a language. You could call it a dialect.

Rail[1] is a programming language, but that is orthogonal to your point.

[1] - http://esolangs.org/wiki/Rail

Rails isn't a programming language at all, so it can't really be a "unique" one.

Ruby on Rails is one of many frameworks on top of the Ruby language.

The grandparent was right, in a sense, because while Rails definitely is not a standalone language on its own, it is an embedded DSL since you are working at a much higher level of abstraction than what Ruby offers out-of-the-box.

You could say the same about Ruby and C.

>Ruby is a DSL for C since you are working at a much higher level of abstraction than what C offers out of the box.

I don't think that's how it works. Ruby is general-purpose, unlike Rails, which solves a very specific problem by building on top of core Ruby.

Back to the topic, here's an explanation http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2005/04/why-danish-programmers-a...

That article is just a bunch of prejudices. And I say that as a Dane. I am sure American, French or Spanish programmers think for themselves too and that they also take pride in their work.

First of all, a number of nations in Northern Europe have done well in tech: Dutch (python), Norwegians (css, opera), Swedes (erlang, skype), Finns (linux, nokia) and Brits. What do these countries have in common? They are close to each other, they had strong universities within science or engineering before the computer revolution, they have been wealthy for the past 50 years or more and they speak English as a first language or as a strong second language.

You get nowhere in computer science without a good understanding of English. Virtually all the popular programming languages use English terms, most (all?) articles are in English and almost all documentation and tutorials are in English years before they are translated to local languages (if ever). So it's much easier for an average Scandinavian or Dutch teenager or college student to get into computer science than for an average Italian or Greek.

Oh, and they have all had a generous welfare states for the past 50-100 years so even back when computer science didn't pay well it wasn't so risky to go down that path.

> it's much easier for an average Scandinavian or Dutch teenager or college student to get into computer science than for an average Italian or Greek.

Speaking as a Greek person who is also quite average, English was never a problem getting into programming. I live and work in the UK now, but when I first landed on these rain-sodden shores, my spoken English was bad and I had trouble communicating with people. Not so with computers- and I never had trouble with programming languages.

I think the same would go for Italians and even more so, since English has borrowed a lot from Latin, which is basically just an older form of Italian (with high school Latin, you can understand Italian perfectly well and even parse sentences on the fly as people speak to you :)

I think the reason why you may not find many Greeks or Italians, or generally people from non-English speaking countries in the history of computing is the opposite of what you suggest: any contributions they might be able to make are hard to transfer over to the English-speaking world. Any papers are in languages that are not understood in the English-speaking world and translation is not always available.

If I were sure that this was written seriously I should have replied along the lines of there being few chances for such an amazing resource as the best programmers in the world by a large margin to be untapped by greedy capitalists who'd then topple America's software empires.

Since I'm not sure that this was written seriously, I'll point to anecdotal evidence of cfront, Stroustrup's C++ compiler, being the buggiest C++ compiler ever written. (Here's a bunch of bugs found by modern static analysis tools - http://www.i-programmer.info/programming/cc/9212-finding-bug... - but unfortunately I can't find the Usenet old posts telling that cfront was the buggiest C++ compiler of its time, and that early g++ was the next buggiest. The Unix-Haters Handbook has evidence from James Roskind who tried to make a yacc grammar for C++ - to a first approximation, an impossible thing to do due to a few goofy design decisions in the C++ grammar - and who said that every time when he tried to feed cfront input that would enlighten him with respect to some dark corner of the grammar, cfront crashed.)

Huh? From your article:

I should say right away, I haven't found anything crucial and I think there are three reasons why PVS-Studio hasn't found serious bugs

The rest of the article doesn't seem to back up your claim really. It even says "The code is of high quality."

Regardless I agree the article isn't very good, serious or otherwise. If it is serious it uses one anecdotal piece to make a sweeping claim on the productivity of programmers across nations...

They show bugs in cfront, trying to sell their product to C++ developers. They'll likely call cfront high quality.

That said, Roskind's experience is more telling than the output of a static analyzer because generally and certainly with a compiler, actual testing shows orders of magnitude more issues than static analysis.

And Lars Bak is the co-author of Dart.

ah yes, forgot that one. He also wrote the V8 javascript engine that powers chrome.

Other notable Danes include Poul henning Kamp that among many other things wrote the varnish cache and Lars and Jens Eilstrup Rasmussen that wrote the original google maps.

The Eilstrup Rasmussen brothers also invented Google wave, but I'm not sure how big an accomplishment that is :-)

You may have heard of the Rasmussens' other project: it's now called Google Maps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Rasmussen_(software_devel...

2nd paragraph

You may have heard about something called maps though. Google maps.

I believe BETA is also a programming language born in Denmark: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BETA_%28programming_language%2...

Anders of course also did TypeScript.

Scandinavia as a whole has done alright on the programming front. Of the LAMP stack - which still runs a huge part of the web, though many of us have moved on - all but the 'A' originated here. Linux in Finland, MySql in Sweden, and php in Denmark. The output of course being styled in Norwegian css.

Don't forget the Icelandic dalvik VM.

I'll add COMAL to that list. I believe it has become somewhat obscure today, but still, it was developed by Danes too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMAL

Yeah, makes me proud to be a Dane.

I don't want to be unpleasant at all. But let's please not build up artificial walls between us. Humans moved to different parts of the world and developed slightly differently. But let's not think that being born into the "same" culture or ethnic group gives anyone some kind of password to share in some achievement.

I also admire this man's work and am grateful for his intelligence and efforts.

It's not so much that you're entitled to anything because you're of a certain ethnicity or belong to a certain culture, but if we have 200 different cultures, and some metric that we want to perform well according to, should we not try to learn from those cultures who excel?

Saying that being proud of a culture is building walls and thus bad is over-the-top PC. Just because I am proud (of something) does not mean that I don't want to share it with you if you want to give it a go.

You're acting as if "I'm proud to be Danish, 'cus look at all these great CS Danes" is the same as saying "We need to be the only nation in the world, and we want to wipe out everyone who thinks differently." Being proud is great, as long as you don't turn blind to other people's value and worth.

>But let's not think that being born into the "same" culture or ethnic group gives anyone some kind of password to share in some achievement.

Why not? He is a contributor to the culture that produces a disproportionate amount of successful computer scientists. If these walls were artificial, there would be no disparity.