Joe Armstrong Quotes

This is a letter about a conference. Does it go in letter or in conferences? This is a categorization problem, as soon you put categories into things you don't know what category to use. This is the problem in object oriented programming, this is why object oriented programming is bloody stupid.

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

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

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

I have a problem with categorization problem because I cannot say this thing got to be in that module or that class.

People says notation does not matter, they don't like Erlang notation [...] but notation does matter.

The different ways of hiding the state are the things that different functional programming languages offer. In Haskell they call it monads, in Erlang they call it processes.

I do not think we can build systems that are large with large components.

Instead of handy compose, we'll keep compose exactly the same and will write a little function which takes a function that does not have debugging and return the function that does debugging. And we have a function that accept only one argument, the un-debugging version, we'll add another little function that automatically add an argument to it. When we done that, we can bind call compose on it and everything will work and will be nice. And will be peace on the earth and everybody will have a good time.

I don't think a program should be bigger than possibly 128 kilobytes, possibly 64 kilobytes. It should be possible to understand that program in its entirety.