also, Danes came up with or were leads in the development of Ruby on Rails, PHP, C#, Turbo pascal, C++, Delphi, Google maps, Google wave, the V8 javascript engine for Chrome, and the Varnish cache.

Pretty good for a country with half the population of New York I'd say.

This is true, but the unfortunate angle on that is that, with the exception of Varnish, none of those things were actually made IN Denmark, if I recall correctly.

Update: Seems DHH started RoR while studying at CBS.

Varnish was started in Norway as far as I know. Not that it's that relevant to know exactly where it was started. :)

The lead developer, Poul Henning-Kamp, is a danish national but was hired by a norweigan newspaper to develop Varnish.

The initial funding came from Norway, but the code was written partially in Norway and Denmark IIRC. Perhaps mostly Denmark.

Turbo Pascal was definitely Danish (polydata)

Very interesting. What do you think is responsible for this? How did it come about? My understanding is that the education system in Denmark (and their core educational values) is different than most places.

> What do you think is responsible for this?

Legos? That and crappy weather that makes staying inside a good idea:-)

Lego is a medium. Like paint or sand. No need to pluralise :-)

It's a fairly fluid concept. In Italian, for instance, spaghetti and capelli ("hairs") are both plurals, rather than their "uncountable" English equivalents. I.e. "We're having spaghettis for dinner, but first comb your hairs".

I always played with "Legos" as a kid, so for me that's what they are.

All of scandinavia is really good in IT in regards to their tiny population. They also often have the best gamers/clans in the world :) Most of the year its very cold, IT infrastructure was very very good 10 years ago already and the countries are wealthy and have very good educational systems.

True. Although I recall a couple of studies in the early nineties that measured skill levels, and also "claimed skill levels". Scandinavia was top-tier in actual skill levels, but a country-mile winner in claimed skill levels.

Yeah true. However from my understanding a country like Finland focuses on different things than Denmark. Look at their rankings on the international PISA tests for example. Finland scores are great, Denmark not as much (18th I believe). I remember reading at some point (though now I'm not finding it) that Denmark focuses a bit more on personal development relatively, while Finland (and most other places) on the knowledge (math/science).