That article is just a bunch of prejudices. And I say that as a Dane. I am sure American, French or Spanish programmers think for themselves too and that they also take pride in their work.
First of all, a number of nations in Northern Europe have done well in tech: Dutch (python), Norwegians (css, opera), Swedes (erlang, skype), Finns (linux, nokia) and Brits. What do these countries have in common? They are close to each other, they had strong universities within science or engineering before the computer revolution, they have been wealthy for the past 50 years or more and they speak English as a first language or as a strong second language.
You get nowhere in computer science without a good understanding of English. Virtually all the popular programming languages use English terms, most (all?) articles are in English and almost all documentation and tutorials are in English years before they are translated to local languages (if ever). So it's much easier for an average Scandinavian or Dutch teenager or college student to get into computer science than for an average Italian or Greek.
Oh, and they have all had a generous welfare states for the past 50-100 years so even back when computer science didn't pay well it wasn't so risky to go down that path.
> it's much easier for an average Scandinavian or Dutch teenager or college student to get into computer science than for an average Italian or Greek.
Speaking as a Greek person who is also quite average, English was never a problem getting into programming. I live and work in the UK now, but when I first landed on these rain-sodden shores, my spoken English was bad and I had trouble communicating with people. Not so with computers- and I never had trouble with programming languages.
I think the same would go for Italians and even more so, since English has borrowed a lot from Latin, which is basically just an older form of Italian (with high school Latin, you can understand Italian perfectly well and even parse sentences on the fly as people speak to you :)
I think the reason why you may not find many Greeks or Italians, or generally people from non-English speaking countries in the history of computing is the opposite of what you suggest: any contributions they might be able to make are hard to transfer over to the English-speaking world. Any papers are in languages that are not understood in the English-speaking world and translation is not always available.
First of all, a number of nations in Northern Europe have done well in tech: Dutch (python), Norwegians (css, opera), Swedes (erlang, skype), Finns (linux, nokia) and Brits. What do these countries have in common? They are close to each other, they had strong universities within science or engineering before the computer revolution, they have been wealthy for the past 50 years or more and they speak English as a first language or as a strong second language.
You get nowhere in computer science without a good understanding of English. Virtually all the popular programming languages use English terms, most (all?) articles are in English and almost all documentation and tutorials are in English years before they are translated to local languages (if ever). So it's much easier for an average Scandinavian or Dutch teenager or college student to get into computer science than for an average Italian or Greek.
Oh, and they have all had a generous welfare states for the past 50-100 years so even back when computer science didn't pay well it wasn't so risky to go down that path.