Joe Armstrong Quotes

Let me just say something about pipes. The great UNIX philosophy was: the output of my program should be the input to your program, to compile things together.

Finally after hours of googling, I can write my program. That what's I call research. The research takes 3 hours, writing the program takes 2 minutes, for the final version. You publish the program, and you throw away the research. That's not smart. Somebody later cannot figure out how you did it because all he's see is the end result.

One of the things we’ve forgotten, is the importance of protocols and not describing them accurately.

Shared memory is evil.

you can basically make things as reliable as you by having lot of machines.

That's quite easy to make things that are not fault tolerant and not scalable.

The middle man brings conceptual integrity to the system.

Why do the designers to this programming language want correctness? It's because, if you write program in erlang, and it turns to be incorrect, I got the blame. But if it works you got the credit.

I think we need to start describing configuration languages that describe how the thing is built and configured.

We need mechanism to make things smaller and smaller.

Without Google and Stackoverflow programming would be impossible.

One thing I wanted to do with Prolog, pick some sort of better things. Better stuff should happen when it fails. The other problem with prolog is that you could only do one thing, and you can only have one process. So I wanted and I thought Prolog was really great. I made an algebra to describe telephony in Prolog but the only trouble was you could only describe one process and if they didn't do what you'd expected them to do when you got failure, it didn't work.

I think software are getting worse and worse in time.

There is another word for really big comments: a book!

I think we seem to have forgotten that things can be small. This way of decomposing systems into small things that I can reason about.