Joe Armstrong Quotes

I think software are getting worse and worse in time.

Erlang was specifically designed for fault tolerance, it was not designed for anything else.

Your first question must always be: what is the most difficult part of this problem that I am trying to solve and then try and solve that. If you can't solve the most difficult bit, give up! Seek advice, find somebody who can solve it!

deployment is a problem because even if somebody made an open source privacy application, it needs 50 million users to take off. Apple and Google and everybody have dominated this way of deploying something to hundreds of millions of people [...] the first one to get a hundred million users wins basically.

The clarity of programming languages have several advantages over traditional languages. For example, programs in such languages are considerably shorter than the equivalent programs in imperative languages. They also encourage clear programming styles.

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

In Haskell, C or Java, or any these languages, that function composition will fail at compile time. Type system will say: we'll not allow you to compose things together because the types are wrong. But in Erlang, you can do anything you bloody would feel like just found together and know it at run time not at compile time. Some people think that is not so good. Some people think that is pretty cool. I will tell you why it's pretty cool. It's actually late binding, it makes decision late.

I got this Prolog system, and I thought, let's do a message passing object model there. There were an influence with CSP.

Meta-Programming Erlang is not really easy because of the way the trees are parsed.

Many programs don’t have well-defined interface. They should have.

If you try to fiddle around with your code to make it efficient, that's the wrong thing to do. Keep on track with the latest hardware. That's the right thing to do.

Computer systems fail. We have to deal with it, we can't ignore it.

I don't like modules. It's a sort of love/hate relationship. The problem with modules is the classification problem. When you have written a function you don't know in what modules you put it in.

You can't do anything unless you detect the fault.

The inability to isolate software components from each other is the main reason why many popular programming languages cannot be used for making robust system software. (page 32)