Indian Software Success – How Come?
A 35 year old Indian advertising executive (after a short London based assignment, at Car Phone Warehouse) had an interesting observation.
There is a transfer effect! We Indians, get respect in some parts of the world today, because we are Indians. Earlier perception of Indians was based on the individual. Indians were not respected for their nationality. Now, Indians gets some respect because they are Indian.
How Did This Happen
And the Indian image makeover was due to the work done by the software guys on the Y2K problem – this advertising executive claimed. The Y2K was predicted to be a major disaster – waiting to happen! The world waited with bated breath – for planes to crash; banks feared billion dollar frauds; Generals were afraid that defence systems would go on a blink. Indian software companies got the Y2K contract by the truckloads. The whole world piled on to Indian software companies – as there were few credible alternatives.
Come Y2k, nothing happened. The world over!
It just another day. It was the biggest triumph for the Indian software community. Done at a cost of a few billion dollars. The Y2K meteor did not crash onto mother earth – it was detonated at the time of entry into the earth’s atmosphere by Indian software programmers. As usual Indians do not celebrate their major successes. (Instead they make a big deal of the 20:20 world cup)
India’s software success has many claimants – and all of them have had a role to play. And in this crush, one small thing escaped everybody’s notice.
Why Did Software Become Such A Big Thing
Why is it that software became such a big thing in India? How come Indian engineers with such low levels of prior exposure to computers could ramp up so quickly and tackle such a complex problem? How could a country with the lowest computer penetration become the largest expeorter of software in less than 10 years.
The answer goes back to 5000 years ago.
When Sanskrit language was invented. Yes. Invented.
What!! What Has Sanskrit Got To Do With This
Sanskrit is an artificial, synthetic, revolutionary language – unlike all other languages in the world; which are Prakrit (natural and evolutionary). The next set of artificial languages came into this world after 5000 years later.
About 50-75 years ago, the next set of artificial languages were invented. These are the computer languages. Between the invention of Sanskrit and the computer languages , there was no other culture which created an artificial language system.
What is special about Sanskrit?
Sanskrit is nothing but a database system with millions of database tables and a system of linking concatenated data records. Every word is a table (I studied Sanskrit 30 years ago, and if I remember correctly, it is a 3 column x 8 row table). And all words then combine with each other as per these table rules.
And all Indian languages are derived from Sanskrit.
While most of us do not know Sanskrit or understand it’s structure consciously, we all use Sanskritic structures everyday. It is easy for us to learn another “Sanskritic” language! Hence, for all those brilliant engineers, their base in Sanskritic languages gave them a head start.
And the rest, as they say, is history!
PS – Most malware, denial of service attacks, co-ordinated system attacks seems to be coming out of Eastern Europe, Russia and now China also. India – nix. In spite of being a software super power, our negative contibutions seem negligible. There is something to this …
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Interesting. When I was studying computing, I remember making the observation that there were quite a few similarities between the “Object Oriented” computing paradigm which governs modern software development and the Hindu religion, which of course is inextricably linked with the Sanskrit language.
I tend to disagree. The Indian software engineers may be good programmers. I do not think the team of Indian software guys detonated the Y2K meteor. Y2K needed lot of programmers(human resources) to go and change the source code, when it comes to details. We Indians did not invent some magic tool to eliminate it. Is it some intellectual piece of work??
Most of the Indian comapnies are in to IT services. All we do is rummage in to some thousands of lines of code and fix 2 lines. im talking about the majority of the work that Indain companies do. How many IT inventions were by Indians? It is very less compared to the number of Indians in the industry.
The knack of programming may originates back to a sound mathematical knowledge of Indians. I read some where that Indian schools have a better maths curriculum. I like Sanskrit. but Im not convinced with your logic.
Anyway my point here is, Are you not trying to take more pride than you deserve?
There are only three things about software …
1. Code – Solid, safe, reliable, iron cast, bullet proof, completely tested code. This takes time and coders. No magic bullet here. Pure disciplined, back breaking, meticulous, detailed grunt work. God, I haa-atttte this part!!
2. Code – at a reasonable cost. It takes time to write good code as mentioned above . And time costs money. (This I like. I love the smell and feel of crisp (or otherwise) notes.)
3. Code – That meets user(s) requirements. Code that user(s) will pay for. In case of product software, you need somebody to under write the risk of writing code that users may not want or what if somebody has written better code. (Basically, getting myself a sugar daddy – which also I like).
So to sum it up … it is code … code .. code.
As for credit, if at all I am taking away credit, it is from all those who created this success. By saying that they deserve less because they had a historical advantage is possibly unfair.
The historical advantage theory still does not explain the impossible build up in 10 years of capacity, training, infrastructure, investments, recruitment, user engagement, application mapping, stress points understanding, et al. Hence, the pride.
As regards mathematics skills …
Where was modern maths born. India. Zero, the value of pi, the decimal system, the ability to predict eclipse. These my dear Bix, are Indian inventions. The European Renaisance, creativity, inventions, discoveries co-incided with two things.
The Loot of (Red) Indian Gold and the adoption of the (Brown)Indian decimal system in the West in the 16th century. The (Red) Indian gold funded the Western Civilisation and (Brown)Indian mathematics gave them the tools.
Dearest Bix, you have done a QED (Quod erat demonstrandum) of my theorem.
Thanks.
Sanskrit went through two major phases of development. First one was 5000 years. Then, 2500 years ago, Panini introduced some definite syntactical elements to Sanskrit. Modern computer languages give credit to the Panini–Backus Form (earlier called as the Backus-Naur Form). It is a meta-syntax used to express context-free grammars, a pre-requisite for programming languages.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panini-Backus_form
In addition – around the same time, the concept of Binary numbers were introduced in India by Pingala.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_numeral_system
http://home.ica.net/~roymanju/Binary.htm
Research is needed to understand India’s motive to improve the syntactical coherence in Sanskrit and the extensive research on Binary numbers in the same period. Nothing currently explains the application for research and improvements in these areas.
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