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Comment by IYasha | Hacker News Reader

I'd also note the hereditary love for trade/manufacturing secrets which transformed into adoption of extremely proprietary licensing. Developers prior to ~2015 hardly ever considered publishing their code or even format specs. This secrecy has deep roots and it really annoys and pisses me off. I'm not narrowing down on corporate software - even hobbyists who write "dating games" would never publish code even if it's something ridiculously simple. I can hardly remember an example of FOSS from Japan except for CrystalDiskInfo. But I can tell for sure, when you were using japanese software from before 2010s you could FEEL it, the proprietaniness, the secrecy, the know-howness, the one-of-a-kind-ness, handmad(e)ness :) I still remember trying that "dark internet" sharing program... SO secret and proprietary, so much security by obscurity - it made be laugh, cry and facepalm.

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I've worked for Japanese companies several times in the eighties and nineties and this was definitely a thing. We were an American division and yet we couldn't even get source code or art for the game we were supposed to be making for them. This continued when I worked for a Japanese video card company. They had good programmers but they jealously guarded their code even from other Japanese programmers in the same company and surely they wouldn't give any to us... working at the same freaking company. Another thing about Japanese code that was notable is that in my experience it was always bespoke and custom and quite often spaghetti. It could be brilliant but it had that hand crafted aspect, and was inscrutable outside of the mind who created it. There was no 'computer science' or any attempt to make it engineered - no self conscious thought about how to make software better other than to meet the target and often that target was defined by performance so the end result was no slouch but it wasn't what you would call elegant. This approach becomes very hard to scale. And I believe that is a key element in why Japanese software lagged. Great craftsmen but they did not evolve into engineers but of course I think this is probably changing because my snapshot is old.

I'll also speak to 'elitist' of the top comment. One of the first times I had felt prejudice was when I wrote a very good piece of code for their video card which accelerated some video processing by 4X or more. Seriously they (the Japanese) were surprised and started treating me like a miracle talking dog as they just couldn't seem to get their mind around me being able to figure out their systems and contribute something impactful. Kept asking me - how did you do that?

Alternatively maybe they just didn't think a 4x speedup would be possible? Or their internal culture discouraged people making improvements to code they didn't originally author? Or they thought you did impressive work?

But, seriously, how did you do that??

Mostly by eliminating a lot of individual copying steps - also understanding how the texture swizzling worked and writing directly to that format and combining all the steps and writing very good code that used MMX. Often these types of optimizations are things that add speed at the expense of generality but I still think they are useful.

> I can hardly remember an example of FOSS from Japan except for CrystalDiskInfo.

The programming language Ruby has to be the most famous Japanese open source software of them all

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) on the silicon valley community.

Perhaps people that come from minority spiritual communities have to "think different?"

Are you saying Buddhist thinking helps SV or hurts Japan? Or both?

I'm not sure, I'm someone that has studied a little Buddhism, and lived in Japan, but I don't live in SV and haven't lived in Japan for almost 30 years. I am just pointing out that it is notable that Matz is probably the most well known Japanese software engineer, and he is Mormon, and wondering if that influenced his thinking. And, if "that" was because he had a very different spiritual experience in Japan. Or, perhaps, wondering more generally, if "anyone, anywhere having an non-majority spiritual experience" puts you into a mode of thinking that leads to exciting outcomes, such as inventing an amazing language like Ruby!

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.

>Perhaps people that come from minority spiritual communities have to "think different?"

Christians are only 1% of Japan, but eight prime ministers have been Christian! <https://www.asianstudies.org/publications/eaa/archives/a-chr...>

Another example is OpenToonz[0], which is one of the animation tools used by Studio Ghibli and developed in collaboration with Studio Ghibli, another Japanese company called Dwango, and an Italian company called Digital Video. Although, Digital Video does have a premium, paid version called Toonz[1].

0: https://opentoonz.github.io/e/

1: https://www.toonzpremium.com/

Less broadly known than Ruby but the late Itojun[1] and the KAME project[2] also put an inordinate amount of effort into adding IPv6 and IPsec support to the BSDs.

[1] https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/rest-in-peace-itojun-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAME_project

I think that's the main reason. Copyright and trade secrets stifle software development. Any development really but it's most visible in software development.

Information wants to be free.

> I can hardly remember an example of FOSS from Japan except for CrystalDiskInfo

FatFs from Elm-ChaN is very popular in embedded systems: http://elm-chan.org/fsw_e.html

This example is complicated by games also being art and how it can be hard to separate both (even when it's just graphics and audio that you keep on a more closed license).

See how Western games are still overwhelmingly closed source, despite the now known rewards : like Civilization 4 (2005) opening most (but not all) of its C++ (dll) source code, as well as easy to mod XML & Python scripts resulting in a still alive modding scene even today, 18 years later, and after 2.5 (much more restrictive) sequels !

Why do you think that having people buy a game once and then keep playing it for 18 years is a reward for the developer?

Because it is nice when your customer are happy with what you've sold them instead of running hate campaigns online?

Because it's a tiny minority of fans ? Civ4 sold millions of copies.

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