Still doesn't explain why I can't name a hugely popular programming language, library or framework created by a French programmer but several by Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Dutch, all small countries but where English is a very strong second language. I'm sure there are great French programmers and programming languages, but doesn't is strike you as remarkable that there are not more?
From a country of 5 million (Denmark) you got the creators or cocreators of C++, C#, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Turbo Pascal etc. From a country of 60 million you got ...?
France is a a power house in so many other engineering fields like nuclear power, auto industry, aviation etc so they clearly have engineering talent. But in software, not so much.
There's a ton of French influence in software: Symfony, OCaml, lots of Java stuff...
But I treat "made in France" like a warning label for anything software, hard to explain exactly why :)
I guess it might be because they have very few self-thought people (probably because university is decent and free) that have that "intuition for how to simplify stuff and make it obvious and grok-able" (academic education tends to kill this "intuition" in people). Also, there's a kind of cultural "hate" for KISS and "complexity reduction" in general - they tend to view complexity as an asset somehow, quite a messed-up mindset imho...
...and also, ugly as it may be as a language, PHP is a great tool at reducing complexity if you think higher-level (deployment, scaling): the shared-nothing, each requests runs from scratch (and in an isolated process) architecture makes lots of things 100x times simpler. Of course, this wonderfully simple architecture turns 100% against you if you have the bad taste of trying to write a big and "properly engineered" framework on top of it.
I kinda love PHP as long as I don't have to read/write any of it myself ;)
(Oh, and you made me realize what's the core of my "french software" stereotype: getting complex-vs-simple completely backwards! ...of course, it's just a funny stereotype, the real people I've actually known are all smart and cool and understand trade-offs even when we don't agree on architecture and organizing stuff :P)
Did I say anything about PHP?! I mentioned Symfony but that's contrary too the point (and a fine example of over-engineering, btw...).
And Ocaml seems cool, though Haskell people see it like "eager Haskell with too many features and complexity and syntax on top". I took a look at the Ocsigen Ocaml web framework long ago though, and I was like "jeeez, wtff"... the language may seem cool, but that thing... ugh... But I can't really have an opinion on that since the only truly functional languages I've really played with were dynamic (Clojure and Erlang), static + functional is not really my area of experience.
Haskell people see Ocaml as a language with too many features and complexity? really? Haskell, a language with a billion extensions? Have you ever tried compiling ghc?
I don't know about ocsigen(i don't do web development), but i guess all web frameworks are more complex than they need to be.
I haven't even mentioned all the formal verification stuff(coq, a verified C compiler, frama-c etc.) that come from inria.
I mentioned PHP because the GP was saying languages like PHP that comes from denmark etc., but nothing from France.
I don't have immediately all the examples in my head but one which comes to mind is Docker, created by a bunch of french people including Solomon Hykes. It's not like Docker appears every single day on Hackernews, uh ;) ?
