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chubot

A bit of a tangent, but it's interesting how many languages come from Nordic countries:

- Simula - Norway

- C++ - Stroustrup is Danish

- TypeScript / C# - Hjelsberg is Danish

- PHP - Lerdorf is Danish

- the v8 team including Lars Bak is Danish, and has developed several languages

- Erlang - from Ericsson in Sweden, though Joe Armstrong was British

Well now that I write it out, it seems like it's even more Danes than Nordic countries!

(Someone wrote pretty much the same comment here in 2016 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833073)

Hm also from the same thread, L, M, and P from the LAMP stack all originated in Scandinavia! Didn't realize that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10835311

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Maybe spending long time in the dark every winter is good for thinking about programming languages.

IIRC, Linus may have said that somewhere about Linux.

That and it being too expensive to go out and get drunk ...

> Hm also from the same thread, L, M, and P from the LAMP stack all originated in Scandinavia! Didn't realize that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10835311

Was going to mention that the Netherlands is not in Scandinavia until I remembered that the P is not Python :P

It is interesting that so much foundational tech comes from Europe when I think there is a common perception of that generation of tech as being largely driven by the US (MIT, Bell, etc).

Also: ssh, mysql, qt. A bit more niche: varnish, opera webbrowser...

curl

In that case it could be worth mentioning CSS, by the Norwegian Håkon Wium Lie.

I often feel like the beginning of the 90s was a missed opportunity by Scandinavian companies. There were many great companies and individuals that were innovative, but could not compete due to the lack of VCs from Silicon Valley and a smaller domestic market

Norsk Data was one of the big guys producing minicomputers in the 70s and 80s. Apparently they held on to minicomputers for too long and quickly lost business to Sun and workstation manufacturers in the early 90s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norsk_Data

There's a cool documentary as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CswjD3plsF8

> It is interesting that so much foundational tech comes from Europe when I think there is a common perception of that generation of tech as being largely driven by the US (MIT, Bell, etc).

The UK chronically undervalues its computing sector. Lots of the pioneering hardware/fundamentals work was done at Bletchley Park in the 1940s, but was destroyed or remained classified for decades. We had a disproportionately large slice of the software industry in the 80s, but that seemed to be dismissed as just gaming; and of course games themselves aren't taken as seriously as e.g. cinema, despite being a much larger market.

Denmark had the mosts c64 groups in the world (the reason for this, I don't know) compared to population size. Most of the people involved with these demo/cracking groups in the 80ies were most likely in their teens. Once the 90ies arrived with the internet, I think it was obvious to most of them what they wanted to do with their life.

Sweden, Norway and Finland came in 2nd, 3rd and 4th. I think US was at place 20.

COMAL, a then mildly popular alternative to Basic, is/was from denmark, too.

That was the first programming language I ever used (taught in school in Scotland).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMAL

As a bonus, it's an anagram of OCaml.

> - PHP - Lerdorf is Danish

Not just your "standard" Dane, but born in Greenland. The only such person I can name.

The AVR microcontroller architecture, perhaps most widely known from Arduinos, is from Norway [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_microcontrollers#History

Broadening the scope a bit beyond just languages and their creation alone, we can add:

Linux - Linus

Ruby on Rails - DHH

Turbo and Borland Pascal, and Delphi - Hjelsberg again

My theory is the long winter months make people try nerdy things. like new programming languages.

Stroustrup once told about how he needed the best of both C and Simula, which resulted in creating C++.

Full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO0PXYMVGSU

Prolog and ML (and also GHC) come from Scotland, while not Nordic, it's close.

Prolog stands for "programmation en logique", and as might be guessed from that comes from France (Alain Colmerauer in Marseille, to be precise). Now Kowalski, who also was an important pioneer in logic programming who collaborated with Colmerauer did work in Edinburgh, but from the horse's mouth:

I have tried to document as best I could our various contributions to that idea in an article published in CACM, 1988, and more recently in a History of Logic Programming, published in 2014. In summary, however, it is probably fair to say that my own contributions were mainly philosophical and Alain’s were more practical. In particular, Alain’s work led in the same summer of 1972 to the design and implementation of the logic programming language Prolog.

https://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~rak/history.pdf

the most influential web framework, rails, came as well from Denmark or at least the author, David Heinemeier.

Could be a cultural NIH syndrome. :)

'Many' is a word that gains its meaning in comparison to some (implied) quantity, and I'm not sure what you are comparing to: you list 5 programming languages but looking at Wikipedia's list of programming languages* five is clearly not very many at all.

Maybe you mean something like "as a share of top 10 most used languages" or "per capita"?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programming_languages

They meant "many important and/or well known" - some things go without saying. They didn't meant to include INTERCAL or BRAINFUCK or OZ.

If we go by nationalities and this list, then that is 3 misses and maybe 1 hit in terms of language design for the Danish. Maybe I should check the creators of the next language I learn and avoid langs created by Danish?

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