<p>Sylvan - I think it has to do with having resources to play around with in the other countries. I had one course in Fortran back in 85 where the end result was to write code for someone in a computer lab to punch holes in cards and feed it to a single main frame that was available for the entire university and it would print out a result akin to hello world, the entire process taking two days.</p>
<p>When I started masters in US, I had access to so many computers where I was typing in code directly and executing the programs that I kept wondering about the punch card process that I left behind. Essentially, we had a lot of access to theory but very low on the resource end to try much of it.</p>