There's nothing special about US software engineering vs. software engineering made elsewhere from a purely technical and know-how point of view.
The key difference is availability of capital and appetite for risk that make US exceptional by enabling a speed of scaling and execution not possible anywhere else (well, other than China).
If US companies that can't be bothered to follow EU laws leave the +500M people market that is the EU, I'm positive some other equally competent alternative (local or otherwise) would appear sooner or later to fill in the gap.
Perhaps the same regulations that US companies keep running afoul of are the regulations that prevent European investors from putting money behind European startup competitors.
The EU has some extremely strong consumer protection laws, which is excellent for consumers, but it comes with downsides too.
> Perhaps the same regulations that US companies keep running afoul of are the regulations that prevent European investors from putting money behind European startup competitors.
Nah, it's all the capital which gets invested into the US caused by the dollar's role in international payments that drives the US exceptionalism is tech.
Like, 65% of world equity value relates to 4% of the world population. That's not sustainable long-term, and if something cannot go on forever, then one day it will stop (and we might be seeing that start to happen now).
Don't get me wrong, the US market has a bunch of advantages (large, one language, standard regulation) but it's mostly all the capital sloshing around that drives the outperformance of the US tech companies.
You simply cannot dismiss the omnipresent differences in American and EU mindset/culture as playing a role in each country's entrepreneurial success and ability to build and scale innovations.
There is a huge culture difference: Having spent time in both countries, an entrepreneurial spirit is valued far more in American culture and is far more present than in the EU.
I don't disagree (apart from the fact that the EU is 27 countries, not one).
Which countries did you spend time in?
I would still maintain that the reason the US is more entreprenuerial right now is because it's easier to get capital (particularly for tech focused businesses). Now, some of that is because of previous tech exits, some of it is culture but to maintain that the differences in capital don't have a large impact is also pretty reductionist.
It's interesting how simplicity so often gets mistaken for a lack of sophistication. Designing a language for clarity and maintainability is a laudable goal, and so is choosing to use one. Chasing complexity, or reaching for the latest trendy language that lets you "express yourself" in ten different ways to do the same thing, isn't what makes someone an S-tier engineer. Simplicity isn't a concession. It's a hard discipline.
> Designing a language for clarity and maintainability is a laudable goal, and so is choosing to use one. Chasing complexity, or reaching for the latest trendy language that lets you "express yourself" in ten different ways to do the same thing, isn't what makes someone an S-tier engineer.
In exactly the same way, complexity you don't understand the purpose of is often disregarded as complexity for complexities sake.
It's easy to get things simple and wrong, and hard to get things simple and right. And sometimes complexity is there for a good reason, but if you don't work hard to understand, you'll fall into the "simple and wrong" camp often.
One problem with simplicity is that it often moves the complexity elsewhere, particularly if you're designing things that others use.
Brainfuck the language is simple to use and implement. It has only 8 commands.
Brainfuck programs are virtually unreadable, unless you can get your head around it.
The advantage of trying to solve complexity is that if you can solve it, you've solved it once and exactly once for everyone involved.
Thing is, it's not even necessarily true for Go. E.g. that whole `iota` thing is hardly a good example of "simple and obvious" language design compared to enums in... just about everything else. Or we could talk about the difference between a nil interface value vs interface value wrapping nil.
Why would anybody choose C++ over Rust in 2025? The biggest (valid) criticisms against Rust are that it is difficult to learn and use, but C++ is like 1000 times harder. When people say Rust is complicated they’re comparing it to modern GCed languages, not to C++.
> E.g. that whole `iota` thing is hardly a good example of "simple and obvious" language design compared to enums in... just about everything else.
I actually disagree with this specific take. I do agree that iota is an unnecessary bit of cleverness (especially with that name) but I’d much rather a langage have nothing than the pile of lies and garbage that are C enums. At least then it’s not pretending.
Maybe a decade ago I saw a video of Rob Pike telling people they can abandon C++ because golang was good enough. He proclaimed that people can toss out their reams of C++ code and replace it with Go. That never really came to fruition -- even as bad as C++ is.
The only godsend of C is that code written in the 1970's can still be compiled today -- half a century later. You can write code in your 20's in C and still be assured it will still work a half century later in your 70s. (as long as you don't use system libraries which might change.... etc.)
A lot of people complain about Rust compile times. But honestly, I'd rather work in a language that is trying to solve complexity rather than push it off on to the user.
As much as I hate Go, I have to admit that it does sort of fill a niche, or at least it did at the time it was released. If you wanted something less baroque and complex than C++, but still care about performance enough to not want to use an interpreted language, and don’t want to use Java because it’s overly verbose and attracts OOP architecture astronauts, there wasn’t much choice other than Go when it came out.
There’s a very high probability that something like Cockroach would use C++ if Go had never existed, so Rob Pike was sort of right, if you squint. On the other hand, if Cockroach were started today it would probably be written in Rust.
I think you’re missing a couple key benefits to go: compile time and cross arch builds. The story here is best in class by far. It’s so so simple and fast to compile go for 10 architectures and distribute a binary.
Then tell them to write all their code in Brainfuck if it's that easy.
In fact, tell them to write a brainfuck transpiler in brainfuck to transpile go lang to brainfuck to make it easier for you communicate with their native tongue directly.
But honestly if you're a professional programmer, you should constantly be asking yourself how do I reduce complexity for others first, not myself. And that's where golang gets it wrong. Golang asks very specifically first and foremost how do they get their compiler right -- even if it comes at the potential expense of the users.
I mean golang is not brainfuck by any margin, and it is reasonable for what it tries to do. But, in my experience, if you're writing code longer than a page, golang is probably the wrong language.
A core conflict is determining who should hold complexity ("how much" is implied). From an operating systems perspective, I like seL4's approach of being a highly minimal kernel, which necessarily means pushing out significant complexity to userspace to handle. I want to go even further in that direction. Despite the massive complexity spike, kernel minimality has significant benefits for increasing userspace programs' power. I think programming languages are somewhat different. Both operating systems and programming languages are deeply foundational notions of abstraction, and even mesh: Smalltalk[0] or Forth being said to include an operating system isn't outrageous. An operating system exposes languages (e.g. shell commands, syscalls, libraries, services) and a programming language undergirds a system. My suspicion is that it's because an operating system is built up, whereas a programming language is the tool in hand. They're at such different levels of construction that they aren't comparable. I have a refinement, which also ties in something I sneakily avoided earlier: programming languages are like kernels, especially microkernels like seL4. Bundling the whole OS is cheating; the job is already done. But I think there's still a difference. When a kernel is built, the OS isn't far behind; a purpose is set. When a programming language is built, it's made (usually) for generality. The exceptions to this (domain-specific languages) prove my point: they have a purpose in mind. The complexity is still there, but building an operating system seems to provoke long-lasting further abstractions (services, components, libraries) whereas programming is more fragmented in its abstractions (frameworks, libraries, language features). Put another way: operating system developers seek simplicity of the whole system, since that is there scope. It's harder to define a system for programming languages, although it is there (the sum of programs produced), and so optimizations are more local at the expense of global progress.
The problem is further exacerbated by needless complexity being seen as sophistication, and in the end; one's competency level. A lot of today's bloat and bullshit is caused by this attitude. Like a football team full of body builders preoccupied with showing of their muscles and wondering why they're languishing at the bottom of the table.
Yeah and no. I would see intellectual dishonesty as worst and the fact that we did not called it that for years enabled these people. They were giving all possible benefits of the doubt. And calling them dumb is kind of benefit of the doubt.
If the president of Brazil, Lula, decides to increase import taxes, the US will mirror this decision. As a result, Lula has set a tax rate that US applies on imports and that US buyers end up paying to the US government.
Yes, they have just decided not to control it and left it in the hands of Brazil.
If they are smart, they just won't follow on the promise... but they haven't being doing that kind of thing recently.
Anyway, we will probably not see any trolling, because increasing the tariffs from Brazil's side would be a minor economic setback, and there are elections next year.
No, while you mirror, you are not in control. But sure, you can decide to stop the mirroring that you started even though now it puts you in a worse situation than where you started. Say, Lula sets the import tax at 100% - will Trump say "that's too high a number for me, I fold"? In that case, he wanted the rates to be the same but now the difference is even higher.
First, Joaquim Miranda Sarmento is not the Portuguese Prime Minister, but the Minister of Finance.
Second, the tax breaks were removed at the end of last year because of a widespread feeling in the general populace that these were deeply unfair policies that were understood at the root cause of gentrification and unreasonable real estate valuations. The median house price in Lisbon and Porto metro areas, are now above what the p95 Portuguese salary can pay. So yes, speculation and wealthy foreigners are an issue, as it's not Portuguese salaries propping these values.
Third, the party in power does not have a majority in parliament. This means they'll need support from other parties to approve this deeply divise tax break. While I'm sure they'll get the support from the Liberal party, I'm seriously doubtful they'll get it from the other parties. It's also quite likely that we'll have new elections in the next 12 months and the party in power, despite many populistic policies in the last 4 months since they won by a few thousand votes the election, has not yet been able to gain a wider trust from the voters since then. I doubt this tax break will see the light of day anytime soon.
Fourth and finally, there has been zero talks about this in Portuguese media. I feel this is more of a politician talking out of his ass without double/triple checking with the prime minister.
> The median house price in Lisbon and Porto metro areas, are now above what the p95 Portuguese salary can pay. So yes, speculation and wealthy foreigners are an issue, as it's not Portuguese salaries propping these values.
The second sentence doesn’t necessarily flow from the first. The same is true in major cities in Canada, New Zealand, England, etc etc, and this has little to do with foreign visitors and much to do with interest rates and availability and quantum of credit.
Canada first massively disincentivized foreign investment and the. limited it altogether because, like Portugal, foreigners were the scapegoats for wildly increasing housing prices. Turned out they had almost nothing to do with it and it was all poor government monetary and lending policy. Governments will do everything they can to deflect blame.
I don’t have direct experience but I have a good friend from New Zealand who says the situation there closely mimicked what he has seen in Canada. Easy to blame foreign money, hard to look in the mirror.
Also, as a side note: “rich person” immigration is absolutely unequivocally not the reason for house prices skyrocketing in places like Moncton, New Brunswick or Campbell River, BC. No one from Monaco or Hong Kong is clamouring to buy houses at 5x historical average valuations compared to income.
I suspect in 5 years it will become obvious that in Portugal the situation had to do with monetary policy and not foreigners as well. Time will tell.
Mostly false. Theyve been trying to attract foreign ”investors" for quite some time. Expo 86, 2010 Winter Olympics. What the clowns didnt realise was all the ”investment” would just go into housing. Nothing else
Every country tries to attract foreign investment. It’s a major component of GDP. And the difference between Canada ca. 1986 and 2010 versus 2018-2024 is… monetary policy! (Though admittedly 2010 looks pretty similar to 2018, house prices were already starting their insane run up).
It’s monetary policy. Housing prices are the fault of governments of various levels (constrained supply at the municipal levels, easy credit at the national levels). It isn’t foreigners, at least not in Canada, NZ, England, etc. and I’d bet money it isn’t in Portugal either.
Sure, but that isn’t the assertion I was replying to!
My personal opinion is the wealthy gravitating to a spot are as much about it being a useful ‘nutrient gradient’ on the monetary policy front, after the primary places are exhausted (like the big US cities) or because those places were less accessible now.
But the original assertion I was replying to was that those places never had the rich foreign investor thing happen - when they absolutely did!
Wealthy foreigners bring money from the outside into Portugal, so they are net positive. And not only money, but also knowledge, culture and diversity. Local restaurants are happy, local landlords are very happy, who is not happy is local renters. Maybe the tax should be imposed on the landlords' windfall profits instead?
I cant help but laugh at the simplification. Net positive for whom?
Landlord and restaurants are happy vs the rest of the population (99%). Its a monstruous policy, considering wealthy nomads pay way less tax than locals.
30% of working people don't pay income tax because they are on the first income bracket (minimum wage or less), but they still pay VAT, 23% in the highest rate. The deductions don't come into play if you don't pay tax at all.
The injustice is simple: "digital nomad" earning pays VAT and minimum income tax, but leeches off roads, socialized healthcare, our nice climate. A citizen earning the same wages for the same job pays VAT and income tax, subsidizing the tax leech. Meanwhile, the immigrants with low wages are treated like criminals, but they don't even get that special tax rate, because they don't pay income tax!
Why should a poor country like Portugal subsidize immigrants from rich countries, but punish those from poor countries? The Americans that want socialized medicine and maintained roads can spend the money on their own country, our pay their fair share like other people living here.
> That's a bold face lie, unless by majority you mean less that 50%.
Ok, fair, I mis-spoke. It was not intentional. What I meant is that taxes on goods and services take a largest absolute % of government revenue. Which is was 37.8% in 2020.
The point I am trying to make is that no matter who is living in the country, they'll be using goods and services, which are taxed, and then the revenue flows to the government coffers. Arguably, people with more money, will spend more money on goods and services, and thus pay more into the coffers in absolute terms.
Meanwhile personal taxes made up just 19.8% of the government revenues.
> The injustice is simple: "digital nomad" earning pays VAT and minimum income tax
1. It is not "minimum", but a flat 20% rate.
2. In absolute terms they pay more though, than the average Portuguese citizen. Public goods are paid for, by the governmetn, in absolute fiat amounts (EUR), not in the percentage of income paid to the government.
> but leeches off roads
How are they leeching off the roads? They paid their share of the tax, and even more (in absolute amounts) as income tax.
> socialized healthcare
The vast majority of expats and digital nomads that I know have private insurance, which is also taxed, and goes back into the coffers, and provides jobs.
And besides, again, they have paid already more in absolute terms, than an average citizen.
> our nice climate
How can you leech off of a nice climate? If a digital nomad (with NHR) enjoys the climate, does it become less joyful for you?
> A citizen earning the same wages for the same job pays VAT and income tax, subsidizing the tax leech.
A person NHR status pays VAT and income tax too. Just income tax is capped at 20%.
> Meanwhile, the immigrants with low wages are treated like criminals, but they don't even get that special tax rate, because they don't pay income tax!
I think this is not on topic.
Anyone who fits into the NHR classification can claim NHR. It's not limited to "expats" or "wealthy" or "immigrants" or "non-immigrants" some limited class of people. In fact, even a Portuguese citizen could have claimed it, if they have not been a tax payer for the past 5 years (e.g. living elsewhere and returning).
The classifications are wide and abundant. Anyone with a profession in demand could have gotten the status.
Immigrants or not, people with no education or experience cannot expect to get the same treatment. Why would that be fair? You can extrapolate the same arguemnt then and say that anyone should be getting the same salary, no matter your education or qualification. That's not how the market works. There's the basic law of supply and demand.
What NHR was doing is simply incentivizing (with a temporary tax break) professional people the government deemed the country needed at the time. I also think this list has been adjusted multiple times, as requirements changed. If you know a better ways of incentivizing people to move to Portugal, I'd love to hear them and perhaps propose this to Portuguese government.
> Why should a poor country like Portugal subsidize immigrants from rich countries
I don't think Portugal is a poor country by any stretch of imagination. It might be "poor" in relative terms to other countries in Europe, but it's not poor in absolute terms.
Should or not, is entirely up to the citizens of Portugal to decide. In the past the citizens have elected officials that represented them and have made that decision, because, perhaps there was a benefit at the time. Then the decision was reversed, because, perhaps it no longer benefits the country?
> The Americans that want socialized medicine and maintained roads can spend the money on their own country, our pay their fair share like other people living here.
And I think they do. Portuguese people, represented by the officials they have elected, have decided that 20% is a fair share for new or returning residents to pay, so incentivize them to move to the country.
Otherwise, these people had many other opportunities and would not want to move to Portugal.
I don't know historically why this has been decided, but my speculation was that perhaps aging population and younger population moving away from the country was a big factor. This kind of outflow is simply not sustainable for long term. Who's going to pay the taxes needed to sustain aging population?
Why do you sound like a western neoliberal politician? There are trillions of ways to fight immigrant outflows. The one the government choose to do in Portugal is blatantly unfair towards its own population.
But why is it capped? Are they refugees? Do they need help? Do they have families?
The income tax law is clear, we have progressive taxes. From each according to its ability. The party that proposed flat taxes ammended it's program to remove it when it would result on a tax increase on workers earning less than 1000€. It's immoral and violates the constitution.
> It's not limited to "expats" or "wealthy" or "immigrants" or "non-immigrants" some limited class of people.
> And besides, again, they have paid already more in absolute terms, than an average citizen.
It's both an incentive and they pay more, a magical elastic number, both high and low.
Can a Uber driver claim that? Or a guy delivering food for Uber Eats? Or a dude working on a grocery store? Because those immigrants are already here, contributing to the economy even when treated like criminals, some have their families even. They don't get any tax breaks because they barely pay income tax, their wages are not high enough (bit still better than their native countries).
This is embedded on the proposal, it's for relatively rich people only, because it affects income tax.
I don't see any justification other than tautology "it's legal because the government decreed it". I'm not contesting the legality, just show the receipts. This was implemented before, and it only increased the housing prices.
> Anyone with a profession in demand could have gotten the status.
And work for a foreign company, interacting professionally with zero natives? How does this improve the local economy? Unless their jobs are barista, barman, chef.
I could even accept getting tax breaks for opening a company employing humans, even though it is unfair to existing companies. But it's not even that, it's tax breaks for living in a resort.
> I don't know historically why this has been decided
I do: a minority government flush with cash from the previous government (another faction of neoliberals) will be voted out at the end of the year, so they are pissing away that money to remain in power. There's no time to evaluate the proposals, they just repeat what was done before and reverted for good reasons.
There's no population outflow, we have positive net migration.
The outflow was during the austerity years, that's why there are less doctors, nurses.
The aging population cannot afford medicine, they are not leaving either. These kind of policies drive the young people away, why subsidise some rich expat to live in my own country? It's better to move to a high CoL area, pay more taxes, but earn much more money anyway. Why don't these countries implement NHR schemes too, don't they want those coveted high earners.
> Who's going to pay the taxes needed to sustain aging population?
Not the expats, if they have tax breaks. They will cost money!
There is a way to make the expats become a net positive, but not when they are allowed to go to Lisbon and Porto and wipe out the real estate market for locals.
Likely could've worked if - they had to pay to access health care and other benefits, plus they could only live inwards in places where the population is decreasing like Castelo Branco etc. And if the distortions in the real estate market became too big in any particular place, they would be banned from that district. That would cut down on work-tourist types who just come for the beach and sun, and it would contribute to actual de-desertification of the interior of the country.
Agreed, but regular immigrants would be a better fit I think, can you imagine the culture shock of some white collar laptop worker to live in Castelo Branco?
I'm a laptop worker and wouldn't want to live in some rural area, I left for the big city on purpose!
If the immigrant comes for a rural area, the adaptation would be simpler, I guess.
That would require supporting people with brown skin, so it won't happen.
It's somewhere in the middle, probably. People talk about wealthy foreigners, tourists and so on "bringing money to an area" as if that money is being uniformly dumped from a helicopter onto everyone. That's never what happens. It goes into the pockets of a relatively small handful of people/businesses, those people will spend a fraction of it, and downstream people will spend another fraction, and so on. It trickles a little, but the entire community is not benefiting uniformly.
gentrification is a problem. But it's hard to truly understand a problem if all sides try to make it extreme.
What does "Portuguese people can't afford to live in major cities anymore." actually mean? Does it mean that major Portuguese cities are no longer inhabited by a majority of Portuguese citizens? Or does it mean that there are some Portuguese people who no longer cannot afford to live there and that the blame for that is the few foreigners who contributed to raising prices in such a way that the those portugues who were already poor now crossed the line and couldn't affort to live in major cities, and joined the other portuguese who already couldn't afford to live there because of other causes of wealth inequality?
EDIT: It's not just mere nitpicking; I really think actual magnitudes are important in in discussions around these topics but the public debates I see often present the problem in very broad strokes and thus inevitably end up in shouting contests by people who have very strong opinions and the rest of us just looks the other way no longer believing what is being said. I know for a fact that that gentrification is destroying europeans city centres. It's very hard to afford to live in other places like Florence, Italy too. But is it really so clear cut that it's because of tax cuts for expats? Or it's just a result of a bimodal distribution of wealth including native wealth?
There is rarely one solution or “cause” when considering something as complicated as the economy. It’s really easy for politicians to play on the fears of the masses. There seems to be a solid 20-40% of ANY country that is willing to place all blame on “the other” rather than realize it’s a complex situation. So foreigners are an easy thing to pin all issues on for a politician to gain power, and it takes a complete failure of their flawed theory to convince the population that “hmmm maybe there isn’t an easy fix” by blaming foreigners. I see this nonsense all the time in Texas.
Sure about 99%? Tourism is 20% of Portuguese GDP. There are 66,000 real estate companies in Portugal. So many more than 1% benefit from wealthy foreigners.
The reason there are many poor people has nothing to with techbros with laptops. Better fix your bloated and corrupt public sector.
The "corrupt public sector" has been focus of complaints at least since the 19th century, across three regimes, but the number of children living on their parents' homes increased after the foreigners with laptops bought the damn houses, either directly, or through real estate funds.
They might or might not be a net positive. I think it's more complicate. It's not just money, but also where the money is going and what it is achieving.
E.g. a lot of wealthy foreigners will increase the rent, prices for restaurants and services. Oftentimes, the quality of restaurants/services might go down (because if you cater to a crowd that only stays a couple of months, there's not the same need to get these people to come back. That are changes that are often received negatively by the locals.
Foreigners also make use of public services like streets, public transport etc., often without paying income tax.
I have not noticed issues with YouTube, but it's been clear to me how gimped Firefox is compared with Chrome on Google Meet. Some missing minor features, sluggish performance and lower streaming quality to name a few.
They did recently (last 6-12 months) add virtual backgrounds to Meet in FF, and it feels fine now. That said I only use Meet on FF and Safari so maybe I don't know what I'm missing out on.
In practice the vast majority of designers are using Mac, so it's not like it not being cross platform was the problem.
The thing that made Sketch lose against Figma was that they never really tackled the issue of collaboration until Figma came along, leaving it for 3rd parties like Invision and others to solve.
Now they have most of the collaboration features they were missing, but by then it was too late and Figma had all the mindshare.
But if Figma keeps following this route, who knows. We might see Sketch grow in mindshare again.
Perhaps my perspective is skewed because I've only been on small design teams during the rise of Figma – but my view is that "multiplayer" was always a sell-to-managers feature, and at best an annoyance for designers.
Why Figma won is, at least in my own experience, due to two areas where they roundly beat Sketch: auto-layout and performance.
Auto-layout was one of those squandered first-mover advantage stories: Sketch had it first, but built it into the symbol/component system and never envisioned it as a global feature. Figma did, and it was a total game-changer. Overnight, everything else felt like using Photoshop in comparison.
Why couldn't Sketch just generalize its own auto-layout feature? They finally did (only about three months ago!) but I suspect it had to do with Sketch's architecture, which leads into the second Figma advantage: performance.
From the start, Figma turned the native-app-versus-web-app intuition on its head. Being browser-based, it should have been much slower than Sketch... but due both to Sketch's legacy as a general-purpose vector graphics app and Figma's stellar engineering org, Figma was leagues faster when it came to the kind of big, complex files design orgs deal with on a daily basis.
Between these two things, the writing was on the wall. I hope Sketch has a chance to come back, though – missteps like Dev Mode give them an opening now that they've had several years to catch up.
Didn't know Sketch did cross-platform hand-off nowadays.
Yet, I still don't believe "most" designers use Sketch, except in some "niches" like startups for example, or really design-heavy industries. Probably differs wildly by country too. What I've seen used most in the wild is Figma and Adobe tools, a lot of times on Windows.
There's nothing special about US software engineering vs. software engineering made elsewhere from a purely technical and know-how point of view.
The key difference is availability of capital and appetite for risk that make US exceptional by enabling a speed of scaling and execution not possible anywhere else (well, other than China).
If US companies that can't be bothered to follow EU laws leave the +500M people market that is the EU, I'm positive some other equally competent alternative (local or otherwise) would appear sooner or later to fill in the gap.