>> I've often wondered why *all* the genius programmers are always Finnish 
>> or Sweedish or Polish or... any European nationallity except English.
> 
>   I don't think that's true. For instance, surprisingly many game companies
> are, in fact, British.

Certainly back in the Amiga days, all the really visionary software 
seemed to be written by people with names you can't pronounce.

OctaMED lets you play 8 sounds at once even though the hardware only 
supports 4. Who wrote that? One Finnish guy, single-handedly.

Somebody replaces the standard system requesters with something much 
more ergonomic. Who wrote that? Hungarian guy.

AMOS is a BASIC dialect with comprehensive multimedia support. Who came 
up with that? French guy.

(Mind you, it's rival Blitz Basic was designed by a New Zeland company.)

Pegger intercepts OS calls to turn any program that supports IFF ILBM 
files into one that supports JPEG files. (Back when JPEG was still 
brand-new.) Who did that? A German company.

>   Anyways, one could come up with tons of cum hoc ergo propter hoc reasons
> why some countries seem to produce more programmers and software companies
> than others. Maybe it's the education system, culture, economic model,
> national identity, secularism, work morale (think of Japan, for instance),
> or numerous other reasons.

Unfortunately, in the UK it seems to currently be "trendy" to be stupid. 
It's decidedly uncool to know stuff, especially about mathematics and 
science. I wonder if there are countries where people actually take 
pride in mathematical skill?

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