Vive la France long live the US

From the article: “France is different. France is romantic. It’s poetic. It’s revolutionary. It’s meticulous. It’s the land where the word craft still means something. We don’t dream big; we perfect small. We don’t scale; we sculpt. We don’t pitch; we argue. The first quality of a French entrepreneur has always been craftsmanship. We don’t create to conquer. We create to master. There are no better artisans in the world… Look around: restaurants, fashion houses, perfumes, wines, software, architecture, even mathematical elegance. Craftsmanship isn’t a niche here; it’s the baseline. It’s a national religion.”

As a computer science professor in Silicon Valley who has never been to France, I now have the sudden urge to learn more about France and visit one day. I don’t know much about French culture, but I’m very interested in craftsmanship and elegance.

I’ve noticed over the years that many interesting contributions to programming language research were made in Western Europe, especially statically-typed functional programming. I could be wrong, but I get the sense that there’s a lot of theoretical CS research coming out of Europe, while there’s more of an applied focus in the United States.