Russia was already always going to lose that "superpower" tag the moment the world shifted from hard industrial goods to consumer goods and technology. The first computer, the growth of the Japanese consumer goods industry, and Silicon Valley likely did as much to collapse the Soviet Union as anything else - they were simply out of the picture the moment we started creating software and portable stereos and personal computers.
I never said Russia won't be relevant - it will always be massively relevant simply beacuse of its size, natural resources, and location.
But hard resources are highly commoditized, and there are few nations with any sort of monopoly over them. The world will be better off with Russian resources, but if it can't access them, there are plenty of other alternatives that can be brought online with some investment.
African continent is rich in natural resources, meanwhile Taiwan is just a volcanic island that produces 90% of the world's CPUs. The same applies to Russia.
I am sure there is some javascript in there, but its mostly a mixture of c/c++ and similar languages and rust to control industrial robots.
For CNC and lathes its p-code.
There is a surprising amount of camera vision, etc used in automation as well.
Entire industrial processes were replaced with code and automation (read, more code) and robots.
And of course robots are produced by factories with robots.
Second, a lot more of what we are doing has been dematerialized. The entire factories that used to make film camera (as just one example) have essentially been replaced entirely with software, and the experience is better in every single way for customers.
Russia has a long history of producing excellent programmers and software engineers, I'm not sure where you get the idea this is where they were outpaced by the rest of the world.
If I had to attribute one thing to Russia's downfall, it would be its geopolitical decision to align itself with China and Iran in global anti-Western sentiment, rather than moving towards joining the rest of the West and the EU as some countries hoped they would back in the 90s.
Russians make for great programmers and software engineers.
Russian economic systems and state/societal incentives unfortunately aren't conducive to helping these engineers build world-class companies and products at any appreciable scale.
Russians are a highly educated population that produces excellent engineers. But Iranians too are in this position.
But they are sanctioned off from the technological advanced world and they can't even import modern chips. Add to that that the corruption and lack of freedom are impediments to building a thriving economy.
I think we will see a huge brain drain towards the West. Germany had top notch excellences too, before the Nazis took power.
I was pretty impressed with Yandex when I was in Russia. The maps were far better and the image translations faster and more accurate than Google. Maybe its because they have access to better local data, but it definitely felt like a well-engineered product suite.
