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I'm in the USA, and essentially only have visibility to coding languages in typical use in my USA-based business. These are primarily C++, C#, and Java. Are these languages that are common here also ones that are commonly used world-wide? To help narrow down the question, I am mostly curious about the former USSR countries that have (or had at recent times) a similar technical programming prowess to what can be attributed to programming abilities in the USA. Just wondering if programming languages can be considered universal languages, or, like spoken/written communication languages, are region or country-specific.

Southpaw Hare
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Milwrdfan
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    [Why do 'some examples' and 'list of things' questions get closed?](http://meta.softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/7538/31260) – gnat Dec 19 '16 at 19:57
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    @gnat, this is an interesting and potentially useful question though, in my view. Can you suggest a way of editing it so it doesn't just become a "list of things" question? – David Arno Dec 19 '16 at 19:59
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    Related: [programming languages used in the Soviet Union's space program](http://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/145669/what-software-programming-languages-were-used-by-the-soviet-unions-space-progra) (likely not currently used, so it's not a dupe) – Andres F. Dec 19 '16 at 20:14
  • Wow, apparently [DRAKON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAKON) (a continuation of the software used by the USSR's Buran space program) is still available. Though now it seems to be a CASE/flowchart-based frontend for mainstream languages such as Java or C++. – Andres F. Dec 19 '16 at 20:30
  • All of today's common languages aside from C, C++, and shell were developed or came into prominence *after* the dissolution of the Soviet Union. There are languages from non-western, non-English-speaking countries, but none of those have a comparably large ecosystem. An interesting (though non-USSR) example is Ruby, which was developed in Japan and had a mostly Japanese ecosystem during its early years. – amon Dec 19 '16 at 20:44
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    @amon Nothing can touch C/C++/Java, etc, I suppose, but the French do some interesting work in languages used within and without academia, such as Prolog and OCaml (which is [big in academia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INRIA) but also [used in the trading industry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Street_Capital)). They don't even register in the radar compared to Java, of course. – Andres F. Dec 19 '16 at 20:55
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    Distribution of languages is more business-oriented than country-oriented. For instance, Prolog has been designed for Artificial Intelligence, not for French developers. – mouviciel Dec 20 '16 at 09:55
  • @amon Python, Perl, Objective-C, Object Pascal, and MATLAB are all in TIOBE's top 20 for December 2016, and all have releases predating the USSR's dissolution. (Assembly too, but that's a collection of languages.) Of course, of those, only Python originated from outside the U.S. (Netherlands), and its release only preceded the end of the USSR by a few months. – 8bittree Dec 20 '16 at 15:05

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