Chinese Academic Suspended After His 'Fully Independently Developed' Programming Language Found To Be Based on Python (ft.com) 107
One of China's top science research institutes has suspended an academic after finding that his "fully independently developed" programming language was based on a widely-used precursor, Python [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From a report: Liu Lei, a researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, announced last week that his research group had "independently" developed a new programming language, named Mulan after the legendary heroine, and touted as having "applications for artificial intelligence and the internet of things." Days later, Mr Liu wrote an apology to domestic media for "exaggerating" his achievements. Mr Liu admitted that Mulan was based on Python, a programming language whose components are freely available under an "open-source" licence, and that it was primarily designed for teaching programming to children, not for AI applications.
A good first step (Score:5, Insightful)
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Are you telling me this [cultofmac.com] is not a real iPhone? (SFW)
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I heard they improved on the F-35, making it better and cheaper to manufacturer. Let's swipe it back.
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Nah - they stole the plans before the issue with the F-35 losing altitude in turns was fixed. At the first public demo, many western observers quietly laughed to see the Chinese had *not* fixed the issue. Even though, at this point, the US had.
The question of whether the Chinese version will have the same cracking issue is up for debate ... since the engine propelling their copy of the US p.o.s. is substantially less powerful, the stresses are going to be less, too.
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Since so many countries already hacked into the plans, we should open-source it and adopt the best improvements.
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This knockoff is bad because it's a poor knockoff and has caused embarrassment, therefore it needs to be expunged.
Good knockoffs are advantageous for the technological advancement they contribute to the nation, and therefore should be pursued.
At least this is how I imagine it would work in a semi-closed nation.
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In fairness to those Chinese companies, western companies gave them everything. Just handed it to them and said, "Make this for us but don't make it for yourselves."
Ooookay, sure, that's how it works.
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Yeah, that's why they have to send people to US companies and factories with USB drives to exfiltrate IP.
Re: A good first step (Score:3)
Forced technology transfer, it's a thing - and it is starting to be formally addressed by latest US/China trade agreement.
If you are nice to the Chinese, some times they'll pay you for the technology [nytimes.com], and if you're really nice they'll contribute to your re-election campaign! [nationalreview.com]
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In fairness to those Chinese companies, western companies gave them everything. Just handed it to them and said, "Make this for us but don't make it for yourselves." Ooookay, sure, that's how it works.
thats is how it works via western standards.
notice how TSMC isnt selling their own knockoff CPUs?
or when an ex-Coke employee tried selling company secrets to Pepsi, Pepsi notified Coke.
copyrights can get pretty 'tarded, but IP ought to be protected, because it's a fundamental motivation to spend all the time and money on R&D in the first place.
If idiot CEOs give them the technology... (Score:3)
... what did people think would happen?
An idiot suit from Intel/Apple/IBM/whoever:
"Here Mr Chinese Factory Owner are the specs for our latest advanced chips we spent 10 years and $$$$ developing. Please manufacture them. You won't steal the IP will you? No? Good, thats all sorted then."
A few months later in Chowmein province: "Honourable Mr Chairman, we have made a million copies of the Western pigs chips but have changed the stamp on the chip packaging. Shall we sell them for 50% less or 75% less? And ther
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You're assuming the CEOs are stupid but your timeline is off. It doesn't happen in a matter of months, they rack up several years worth of very profitable quarters with low production costs, rising stock price and huge bonuses. They don't get punished by investors because most of those are short-sighted too, many are speculating and just looking to time their exit anyway. The attitude of employees is mostly to collect their paycheck and stay while it's good and move on if it's not. Who really cares where th
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You're assuming the CEOs are stupid...
That's Hanlon's razor. The alternative is that the captain and top officers are deliberately steering for the iceberg with plans to cast off in the only lifeboat 30 seconds before impact with all of the emergency supplies and washing up on a tropical beach a couple weeks later with steamer trunks full of cash. Leaving passengers and crew to sink or swim when the ship goes down.
Stupid or criminal, take your pick.
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And the US is the long term victim of both.
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IBMs chips are manufactured in the US, not China
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AmiMoJo is SO TRIGGERED right now you guys...
Knocking off other people's work = Knocking off o (Score:2)
I believe the suggestion is that in Chinese culture it's common ans accepted to knock off other people's work, especially the work of Westerners. This guy knocked off other people's work.
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It's no worse in China than in the west. There are people here ripping off Chinese products and trying to do crowd funding scams claiming that they invented them, for example.
Re: A good first step (Score:3)
What percentage of genuine products also come from China?
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I mean you're right, we're quick to pounce on the Chinese as being bad guys, but at the same time the Chinese seem to have a fairly bad history of faking research and innovation. And it often seems like it's a cultural and political problem, making new incidents seem like its part of a larger problem of Chinese dishonesty.
I guess the cultural angle is innovation or thinking that challenges the status quo seems to an issue there, probably made worse by the authoritarian government not wanting anything that
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Yes, because supply exists totally in a vacuum, and it's not other countries that are driving the demand.
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Now tackle the rest of your knockoff market, China.
Oh, you misunderstand, this isn't about the market. This isn't about protecting the people who would be duped. This is merely about Academic concerns; he was receiving a paycheck for doing this, and they're mad they had to pay for it.
When a factory steals IP, nobody gets paid separately for that work. Engineers are not valued, they're seen as draftsmen. Any payments are related to selling the parts used by the stolen IP.
This guy isn't in trouble for stealing IP. He's in trouble for receiving a paycheck by f
PAYWALL (Score:5, Insightful)
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Plenty of alternate sources, e.g. https://technode.com/2020/01/20/self-proclaimed-chinese-homegrown-coding-language-mulan-found-a-fork-of-python/ [technode.com].
Quantum Wall (Score:1)
I went through Google and got the same article on the same site without a paywall.
I've noticed a trend whereby articles are intermittently pay-walled. It seems a fishing gimmick whereby they get articles in review sites such as Slashdot and Reddit, and then flip the paywall switch when traffic ramps up. A variation is that its pay-wall is randomly toggled, or perhaps even dependent on IP number space, giving the "observers" a quantum-like experience.
I haven't verified these are intentional, but I do notice
This is Slashdot (Score:1)
What's after that, mayhem?
Improved it? (Score:5, Funny)
If he got rid of white-space blocks, give him a Nobel instead of firing him.
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I can haz map?
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Unless you are doing something like emulating Photoshop or weather forecasting, it shouldn't matter. For typical CRUD apps, the database should be doing most of the data chomping. If not, you are writing your app wrong.
If Ruby trades speed for meta-ability, that can be a good thing in many domains. (I haven't personally compared it to Python for that aspect, so won't rate it here.)
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I usually find out the bottleneck is something else besides "slow application language". True, a faster language may make up for some sloppy design, but given a choice, I'd take a better app language feature- and syntax-wise over a better language speed-wise.
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Addendum
Roughly 99.99% of all applications will NOT grow to Twitter size. Play the probabilities, not pie in the sky. If you are a social network startup that depends on the "network effect" to survive, perhaps scalability matters more. But I'm thinking ordinary mundane apps here.
And I'm not sure I'd call Twitter "CRUD". It generally refers to data-centric applications: counting, numbers, and statuses. Twitter is more abo
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Recipes for gunpowder continued to be improved everywhere it was introduced, Europe and Asia, well into the 20th century. That hardly negates the achievement of discovering it in the first place. The magnetic needle compass and several types of movable type were also invented in China within the last 1000 years. As with gunpowder, China also continued to make technical refinements its existing inventions, for example learning to run its blast furnaces on coke instead of charcoal.
But I think it's fair to
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It's Chinese April New Year... (Score:3)
You culturally insensitive slob.
Interesting trend (Score:2)
I'm seeing a ton of articles about Chinese "innovation" that turns out to be based on someone else's work, quite heavily at that. Is there something in their culture that discourages originality?
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The flip side of this,
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That's because it's a common line of propaganda in the west. China does, of course, innovate, and is now much better at playing well with others since the overhaul of its IP laws and office some years back. That doesn't change the fact that a lot of Chinese companies got their initial start by reverse-engineering western-made products and shipping cheaply produced clones domestically and to the developing world (markets that the big western companies typically ignored). This is how companies like Huawei sta
Re: Interesting trend (Score:3)
They have been a culture for centuries of master and apprenticeship. They believe that you must do something 10,000 times to achieve mastery. Theyâ(TM)re very training process is to do it exactly the way it was shown to them 10,000 types. No deviations, no interpretations. Thinking outside of the box is very difficult when your society came from this underlying concept.
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Probably a number of factors but anecdotally one person I talked to said his school in a big city is so full of talented middle class kids that if you want to not just stand out but even just make it as an average performer you have to press every advantage. Cheating is just business as usual to make it in a fiercely competitive society where the new number one new year greeting is about prosperity and profit, not health.
Article is not fully clear... (Score:2)
Was he suspended because he lied about its origins when he said it was "homegrown"?
Was he suspended because it was a copy of something else in the first place when it was supposed to have been developed by him?
Or was he suspended because he copied a crappy language [hackerfactor.com]?
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So basically, he was suspended just for lying about it?
If only the USA truly held its president to the same standard.
So you're saying ... (Score:1)
... Liu Lei Lied?
Remember YACC? (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember Yet Another Compiler-Compiler (YACC). People have been developing "new" programming languages for decades. Implementing compilers or interpreters is actually a lot of fun - I've done at least two myself.
The thing is, there isn't actually much need for new languages. What there is, is a need to whack all the cruft off of existing languages. Which is nearly impossible, so people invent new ones that are essentially older languages minus the cruft. The problem is that extensive libraries are what make a language really productive to use - and a new language generally won't have libraries. At best, it can "borrow" them (like Scala does with Java).
For me, the real question is: Why do maintainers insist on adding more and more stuff to existing languages? PHP was a better language without OO bolted on. Java was a cleaner without lambdas, which are a pretty horrible imitation of functional programming. Etc.
Now, get off my lawn /rant
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That's because languages invariably have to deal with pulls from two different directions: (1) supporting existing / legacy systems; and (2) supporting new features. As compilers age, this gap becomes increasingly large, and the amount of tooling required to allow both to co-exist gets increasingly more complex. While it's relatively easy to come up with a shiny new lightweight/toy compiler, it will invariably pile on more complexity as the gaps between (1) and (2) grow, especially if it gets any kind of ac
Design Feedback [Re:Remember YACC?] (Score:2)
I used to be surprised about how few people who build new languages were willing to seek feedback first, using a rough draft with code samples.
Then I went about seeking feedback on a draft idea, and learned three lessons. First, everybody wants different things. There is probably no way to make everybody happy. The trick may be pissing off the least amount of people, or finding a niche.
Second, people are resistant to new ideas*. They tend to defend either their favorite language, and/or the status quo. I sa
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I still think it's a great concept and wonder why many dismissed even the idea
I think I can answer that. Despite being one of the more interesting thinkers when it comes to programming and programming languages, you've slaughtered one too many sacred cows over the years. You've been branded a heretic and were dismissed on that basis alone.
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Thanks for the encouragement!
It does seem that way. I enjoy specific criticism of my suggestions because I learn from such and improve my suggestions, or discard them if they truly stink. And I have tossed a couple.
But specific criticism is really hard to come by, and the dismissals do indeed resemble argumentum ad verecundiam to me, where the "authority" is either themselves or t
Re: Design Feedback [Re:Remember YACC?] (Score:2)
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Seems like the primary purpose of creating new languages is so you can sell books and training and get rid of highly paid experienced software engineers because they have the same amount of experience in that new language as teenagers who took a 6 week course over the Summer.
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Not impressed (Score:2)
Why is everyone always so impressed with every new programming language? Creating a programming language isn't that hard, and is a "solved" problem in computer science. Anybody can create a language in one afternoon of coding with lex and yacc.
A new programming language doesn't actually have any value, the value of a programming language lies in how much actual usable library code it has available.
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Actually, anyone can create a progamming language even without lex or yacc if its LL(1) parsable. I have written countless recursive decent parsers from scratch in my career for assorted custom scripting languages.
I far prefer writing parsers and lexers by hand than using lex or yacc because the source code is human-readable, and isn't hidden behind a layer of complexity, often requiring additional libraries that have nothing to do with solving whatever problem I might be working on.
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And you know, there is no need for any innovation whatsoever because everything that can be invented has already been invented. /s
Nixon (Score:2)
It's all Nixon's fault. Had he not paved the path for "normal" trade relations with China imagine how different things would have worked out.
Copying extent (Score:1)
Many programming languages have copied from each other, inherited syntax, etc. the bigger issue is whether they've simply taken the whole codebase, slapped a different name on it, and presented it as their own (which this article seems to be suggesting). I'm unable to find any specific link to the developed language, though.
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Damn commies! (Score:1)
Of Course (Score:2)
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It's not that Chinese people can't be creative, but they just don't have the environment to do it.
Well, duh. Collectivist culture can't be creative. That's not the part of the individual people, and yet, the collectivism is built from the sum of individuals choosing it.
Change the culture, change the results. In future generations. But it is their culture to choose, currently this is who they are, at a deep level.
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"that's not the fault of the individual" sorry
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US companies also demand results; that's why we get crap like "ghost add-ons" from Wells Fargo, Comcast, AT&T, etc.
I suspect the difference is that capitalism grew faster in China than the ability of the gov't to regulate it, and people just got into the habit of cheating. The
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If he copies something hard to use nobody would be impressed, though.
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IP Theft? In China? No way! (Score:1)
OH MY GOD STOP THE PRESSES!!!
I can't believe it. It is a red letter day. Someone in China has stolen someone else's intellectual property. Un-fucking-believable. Who would have ever thought it could happen???
SURPRISED? (Score:2)
I would like to think that Trump's recent deal will matter, but I seriously doubt it.
Summary (Score:2)
So there it is. Python is the new Basic.
Re: Summary (Score:2)
It was a sick burn to throw that into his mea culpa; I chuckled.
Yawn...another language (Score:2)
(takes a look at it for a moment, tosses it into the pile)
How about just refining what we have now? Does this wheel really need to be reinvented for the 10 billionth time?
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Where did that dumpster get all of the fuel?
Were you whining when the previous occupant of the dumpster was creating laws out of whole cloth with just a pen and a phone?
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but.... RACISM! Dude, idiot much?
We're talking about tyranny, and the previous ruler of the dumpster fire literally claimed that he could rule (he used code words "get things done") when the people's duly elected representatives opposed him, because he still had a pen and a phone. You're claim of racism is an old, worn-out trope that no longer carries any power outside of your intersectional enclave. You should get out more.
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Right, you claim you're talking about "tyranny" but all you came up with was, but Obama.
Your hood is a bit of a giveaway.
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Right, you claim you're talking about "tyranny" but all you came up with was, but Obama.
No he isn't.
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You are painting with too broad a brush. There is innovation in China, but the prevalence of corruption really costs the society as a whole.
Mainland Chinese culture, under the CPP, has major issues surrounding ethics and morality, especially as it concerns the lost generation, but it is prevalent everywhere. Lying for self-benefit is the norm and that fact forces an otherwise honest person to do the same or lose out. Worse, this is all tided up with "face". It's all hard to watch.
I worked closely with