Joe Armstrong Quotes

British computer scientist (1950-2019)

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Joseph Leslie Armstrong (27 December 1950 – 20 April 2019) was a computer scientist working in the area of fault-tolerant distributed systems.

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Birth Name: Joseph Leslie Armstrong

Also Known As: Joe

Alternative Names: Joseph Armstrong

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

Middle men, this is the key abstraction in Erlang. This is the model of the world. Everything in the world is processes. When ever you got any problem what so ever, it does not matter what was of problem is, you put this transducer thing in the middle. It translate the way things talk to each other in the outside world and internally.

The other thing you have got to do is take the data out of the cloud and put it into your home cloud. Make your own home cloud.

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 always imagine a historian in 2 or 300 years' time writing the history of this period. It would just be like the Dark Ages, the ages of confusion. Will it end with computer failures that kill millions of people or will it transition into something that is for the benefit of mankind? We don’t know at the moment and I don’t know how long it will be before we know.

The API we use in programming languages are not adequate for describing the order in which we can perform the API calls. They are basically useless.

I just want to model what’s going on in the real world

What's legacy code? That's dead programmers stuff, not only there are no comment in it, you can't ask people because they are dead. It written in languages that nobody understand, there is no specification and yet it works beautifully!

Have we got better at programming things in the last 25 years? I think the answer would be no. They've been small improvements.

I thing the first company that's a pure Erlang worth a billion dollars.

If somebody puts a big list of things up, my question is always: what is the most important thing on that list.

Our goal is actually to have about 75% utilization if we had one hundred CPU we would hope that our program will go 75% faster without tweaking it.

I can only implement one thing at a time. I'm a one thing at a time person. So, if you give me that huge list of things, I will implement the most important thing. Which is it?

I think we have to think about how we can make systems out of very small components with very strictly defined protocols between them.

You should not write systems that violate laws of physics.