Joe Armstrong Quotes

One way I think Erlang was a kind of software emulating Tandem machine.

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.

So what's wrong with the shell? and what's wrong with Erlang? It's not LISP!

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!

Four good tools to learn: Emacs, Bash, Make and Shell. You could use Vi, I am not religious here. Make is pretty damn good! I use Make for everything, that good!

We need to know why things fails. If we want to improve our system, we need to put that information into that system into logs or something.

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.

A lot of systems actually break the laws of physics.

Without Google and Stackoverflow programming would be impossible.

I am the world's worst C programmer because it's so complicated I can't understand it [...] All I know is that whenever I write C, my pointers are always missed by one from where they're supposed to go.

Sometimes changing one line of legacy code is incredibly difficult than totally rewriting the entire stuff.

Messages are like files. We don't care how it was created.

[in the next 5, 10 or 15 years] I think we will see repressive states to try and stop technology. We will find free states try and promote it.

Don't be deluded into thinking that is sort of ultimately fault tolerant. You can only provision it for the faulty things that might happen and then for a large class of things it could happen.

We are computer scientists, we are slaves who works for these big companies [Google, Facebook].