Joe Armstrong Quotes

I had a plan. Learn Emacs. Learn UNIX. And learn programming language. What happened? I didn't learn Emacs. I didn't learn UNIX. And I invented a new programming language.

One of the things which worries me is the silly idea with the cloud. If we just store everything in the cloud, the unintentional side effect of that is we will probably lose all our history. And I am kind of worry to life. two hundred years time and look back and say just sorry, we just lost all the history of the last twenty centuries.

Documents are full of paragraphs. But the paragraphs don't have name. So, we can't talk about the paragraphs.

This is fantastic, this a quantum leap in abstraction. Most people are being looking inside the black boxes and trying to understand how they work but I think they are looking at the wrong place.They should have been looking inside the black box to understand programming works and looks on the connected things to understand what do they do.

You should not write systems that violate laws of physics.

When I'm writing a program, my approach is to "write a bit" and then "test a bit." I start with a small module with few functions, and then I compile it and test it with a few commands in the shell. Once I'm happy with it, I write a few more functions, compile them, test them, and so on. (page 60)

If you imagine the combination of petabytes memories with LiFi and communication at tens of gigabits per second but the combination and like 10,000 Cray-Ones and a little thing like your fingernail everywhere in every single light bulb that’s like an atomic bomb hitting software. What we’re going to do with it, nobody’s got a clue.

I started programming in like 76. There was not enough stuff. There was Fortran and Cobol... And Fortran. Now there's 250, 500, 800 programming languages, one new each week.

The problem is more than just the should do when it works, it should also say what it should do in presence of failures that you could reasonably predict.

In a file system, if a program opens a file and does something and then crashes, the operating system closes the file for you. It's not still open and then you can use it again. So I thought to myself, well, a call is like a file. So, what happens if you do this hook, you crash the program. Somebody else will watch (the operating system) will watch) and it will close the call just like closing a file. That was the origin of this thing that's now I call Let It Crash.

I don't like the fact programmers are isolated. I hate all these git rubbish stuff. I mean, this is horrible because it makes you think that programmers are individuals and not part of a community. It makes them thinks that what they are doing is isolated.

I was using Smalltalk and I never actually go through this boundary of sort of simulating the class structure in my head so that I can program itself. It was painful, I used to chose the changelog to find things, I regret you did it.

We need to build a world where there are parallel processes communicating through message passing and I thought they cannot have shared memory because if they have shared memory and the remote going to be the crash.

How to make a list? Collecting the data, that's the easy bit. Sorting it into categories is slightly more difficult. Shortening the list is the most difficult part. That a really difficult problem.

If you can't detect failures, you are unable to recover from them. That's an obvious principle you need.