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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In order to handle failure, you need two machines. [...] You have to be interested in distributed programming. You have to be interesting in parallel computing. You have to be interested in concurrent programming.

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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

The middle man brings conceptual integrity to the system.

Without Google and Stackoverflow programming would be impossible.

Better algorithms probably gave us a factor of 6 in performance. Changing the programming language going to Prolog to C, that gave us a factor of 15. All the rest comes from hardware. So, wait 10 years, you've got a thousand. wait 20, you get a million in hardware performance.