Which country’s computer programmers are the best?*
In Michael Lewis’s bestseller The Flash Boys, there’s a character who claims that the best programmers in the world are from Russia. Apparently, they learned their programming on punch card computers with limited RAM. Since it was very costly to debug code and not possible to run bad quality code in a brute force manner on those computers, Russian programmers learned how to write code that ran right the first time and was perfectly optimized.
I learned programming at IIT Bombay on a Russian mainframe (EC1030), which was punch card with limited RAM. I can totally agree with the above constraints of and outcomes generated by Russian mainframes.
Later in my career, I had the chance to interact with programmers developing extremely high end programs like algorithmic trading for investment banks. Almost all of them were Russians.
Based on the above, I tend to agree with the character in The Flash Boys who claims that Russian programmers are the best programmers in the world.
*: This is the original question I answered. I’m repeating it to help me make sense of my answer in case it’s moved to / merged with some other question that I didn’t answer.