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A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

disruptingjapan.com

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Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#291

Post by IYasha »

xrd wrote: post #174
Cerium wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course that is because Matz is nice.

It's never really occurred to me before, but Matz is Mormon, right? I wonder if that informed his decisions differently than if he were heavily influenced by Buddhist or Shintoist thinking, as the larger population does. It would be fascinating to see if there is any correlation between alternative religions and approaches to software in Japan. Feels like there is a heavy influence of Buddhist thought (mindfulness) o…

It's more of a work culture, I think. Remember the swordsmiths, potters, builders, etc., their dedication and know hows. People are used to this and respect this. Noone blames them. And over centuries the culture of masters, schools and trade secrets only hardened. It's not a surprise these practices are hard to let go of.

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#292

Post by amiga386 »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #289
amiga386 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because that's where the Timex factory where they built the ZX Spectrum was You could say that, but there weren't any problems getting ZX Spectrums in Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh either, and the whole UK was awash with bedroom programmers making piles of games. What I think actually put Dundee on the map was David Jones, attending Dundee Institue of Technology (now know as Abertay University) in 1987, employing hi…

Neither Bathgate nor IBM made inexpensive home computers that could be picked out of the reject pile, sneaked out under a jacket, repaired, and sold down the pub for 100 quid. The thing is that while a lot of people throughout the UK, by Christmas '83 literally everyone in Dundee had a ZX Spectrum. Probably half the reason they had difficulty fulfilling orders is that so many "minor faults" ones on the lines ended up…

I don't know if this is specifically your childhood experience, but you're describing also my childhood too, and I didn't grow up in Dundee. There were plenty of first- and second-hand ZX Spectrums to go around, VIC-20s, C16s, C64s, Amstrad CPCs, and the schools had BBCs. The UK went home-computer mad. Remember when there were type-in listings in C+VG? The Usbourne computer books? [1] INPUT magazine? [3] Kids were swapping tapes like crazy, and writing their own demos and games, all over the country.

While Timex may have played a part and the density of Speccies may have been higher in Dundee, I still think Timex's main contribution to Dundee's games industry was to make David Jones redundant, giving him the money to buy an Amiga 1000 [3]

[1] https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books

[2] https://archive.org/details/inputmagazine

[3] http://www.javalemmings.com/DMA/DMA1_2.htm

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#293

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

Alex3917 wrote: post #243
dudeinjapan wrote: post #193

Tim Romero (author of linked podcast) misses the point. Paul Graham has a far better take on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html The problem isn't that Japanese companies "missed" the opportunity to do software at X point in time--the problem is that they are culturally Japanese. Japan is about consensus-based design, there is a high penalty for making mistakes, and individuality/creativity is not valued.…

Most Japanese didn't historically own desktop computers due to the average Japanese home not having enough square feet to easily accommodate them, which is why they adopted smartphones ten years earlier than every other country except Finland. If they had had a couple more decades to play with computers before software took off as a big industry, maybe the culture would have shifted somewhat.

They could have used gaming consoles with more mainstreamed 'developement kits/setups' instead? That existed at least for some Sony Playstation, or something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000

Running https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project !1!! :-)

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#294

Post by _skel »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #193

Tim Romero (author of linked podcast) misses the point. Paul Graham has a far better take on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html The problem isn't that Japanese companies "missed" the opportunity to do software at X point in time--the problem is that they are culturally Japanese. Japan is about consensus-based design, there is a high penalty for making mistakes, and individuality/creativity is not valued.…

Being culturally Japanese didn't prevent Japanese companies from achieving dominant positions in electronics, automobile manufacturing, video games, shipbuilding, steel production...

Why is software so special?

I would argue that the kind of risk aversion that holds back software companies is just as evident in most of Europe as it is in Japan. It is also the norm in a bunch of American companies in the tech industry, especially the older ones. And China, which is also often brought up as a society where individuality is not valued in business (due to "Confucianism" and similar tropes), is not held back by similar risk aversion and has a massive software industry that can compete internationally.

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#295

Post by [deleted] »

quercusa wrote: post #241
dudeinjapan wrote: post #193

Tim Romero (author of linked podcast) misses the point. Paul Graham has a far better take on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html The problem isn't that Japanese companies "missed" the opportunity to do software at X point in time--the problem is that they are culturally Japanese. Japan is about consensus-based design, there is a high penalty for making mistakes, and individuality/creativity is not valued.…

> there is a high penalty for making mistakes I experienced this working for the US arm of a Japanese company. To report a bug would cause the programmer to lose face, so we had to waste a lot of time going through all kinds of contortions to lead someone to the bug without calling it out. We wrote a lot of "feature requests" that were really bug reports.

[deleted]

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#296

Post by achenet »

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote: post #273
dudeinjapan wrote: post #193

Tim Romero (author of linked podcast) misses the point. Paul Graham has a far better take on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html The problem isn't that Japanese companies "missed" the opportunity to do software at X point in time--the problem is that they are culturally Japanese. Japan is about consensus-based design, there is a high penalty for making mistakes, and individuality/creativity is not valued.…

True. Also, in Japan, you cannot argue with your manager. There is a very strict hierarchy. Another posible reason, very few people in Japan speak English (at least that was the case when I worked there in the 90s). That might have affected international penetration of their software. Perhaps this is why we don't see much software from Germany either.

Germans speak very good English on average, probably some of the best English speakers in the world outside of anglophone countries.

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#297

Post by olivermuty »

_skel wrote: post #294
dudeinjapan wrote: post #193

Tim Romero (author of linked podcast) misses the point. Paul Graham has a far better take on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html The problem isn't that Japanese companies "missed" the opportunity to do software at X point in time--the problem is that they are culturally Japanese. Japan is about consensus-based design, there is a high penalty for making mistakes, and individuality/creativity is not valued.…

Being culturally Japanese didn't prevent Japanese companies from achieving dominant positions in electronics, automobile manufacturing, video games, shipbuilding, steel production... Why is software so special? I would argue that the kind of risk aversion that holds back software companies is just as evident in most of Europe as it is in Japan. It is also the norm in a bunch of American companies in the tech industry…

Because move fast and break stuff doesn’t really work in non-software business I’d say.

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#298

Post by satvikpendem »

ihatepython wrote: post #181
bakuninsbart wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that sarcasm or genuine preference? Either way I'd love to know what drives your opinion in Python vs. Perl!

Well, not exactly sarcasm but a snarky way to say that Ruby was written by a Japanese programmer, so he can't be completely incompetent. Perl is my preference of the three (Perl, Python, Ruby). I agree with 'There Is More Than One Way To Do It', and disagree with 'There Is Only One Way To Do It'. And Perl has the best support for regular expressions. Ruby is OK, but I learned Perl first, so it feels more natural.

Why do you hate Python? And what is your opinion on Nim, Crystal, Rust etc?

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#299

Post by satvikpendem »

rippercushions wrote: post #166
midoridensha wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dishwashers make sense if you have a lot of dishes, and make a practice of filling the dishwasher before washing. For a single person, this can take many days. The total amount of water and time ends up being less by using the dishwasher. However, if you have a small number of dishes so that you can't afford to wait 3-7 days between washings, and need to clean them daily, the dishwasher makes no sense.

Are people really leaving dirty dishes in the dishwasher for a week? That sounds like it would smell terrible and anything left on the earlier plates would be dry as cement by then.

Are you putting dishes directly from eating into the dishwasher? Most people rinse it off, especially anything that could dry out. The dishwasher is more to automate the application of soap and water, not to literally remove every piece of dried food from a dish.

Re: A mistake that killed Japan’s software industry?

#300

Post by _fat_santa »

quercusa wrote: post #241
dudeinjapan wrote: post #193

Tim Romero (author of linked podcast) misses the point. Paul Graham has a far better take on this topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/usa.html The problem isn't that Japanese companies "missed" the opportunity to do software at X point in time--the problem is that they are culturally Japanese. Japan is about consensus-based design, there is a high penalty for making mistakes, and individuality/creativity is not valued.…

> there is a high penalty for making mistakes I experienced this working for the US arm of a Japanese company. To report a bug would cause the programmer to lose face, so we had to waste a lot of time going through all kinds of contortions to lead someone to the bug without calling it out. We wrote a lot of "feature requests" that were really bug reports.

> To report a bug would cause the programmer to lose face

I'm sure there are some bugs that are directly caused by a programmer, but what about all the other inevitable bugs like a vendor upgrading their library, breaking changes, etc?

At least in SWE, the biggest "mistake" here is conflating that bugs and mistakes are the same thing.

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