Joe Armstrong Quotes

We can't do a list of 20 things. You can't do 20 things in parallel. Do one of them. Do the next.

I started programming in like 76. There was not enough stuff. There was Fortran and Cobol... And Fortran. Now there's 250, 500, 800 programming languages, one new each week.

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!

If you imagine the combination of petabytes memories with LiFi and communication at tens of gigabits per second but the combination and like 10,000 Cray-Ones and a little thing like your fingernail everywhere in every single light bulb that’s like an atomic bomb hitting software. What we’re going to do with it, nobody’s got a clue.

If you don't have a book, you don't know how a bloody program work!

If the entire computer crashes, you're screwed. you can't really do fault tolerant computation from one machine.

You have to analyze the consequences of a failure and that to the specification.

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

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

This [showing his smartphone] is about a million time more powerful than the computer but the computer was developed on.

Bad concurrency model, I think, is something that make a lot of programming artificially difficult.

We need mechanism to make things smaller and smaller.

In Erlang, F(G(X)) is used for small steps. Pipes are used for big steps. The big steps semantics is processes. It's messages between processes. Processes are used for big computation. When you got F(G(X)) is a small step, and we map small steps on the same core. We map big steps on processes. Processes map on multi-core. The system just does it for you.

You're a programmer, you've just written 100 lines of codes that C++ programmers have failed to do. You want to show it to people because you're quite pleased. You think they're going to be pleased...

Let's unbreak the web. The web is broken. Let's go out and un-break it and let's bring computation back to these supercomputers that we've got in our pockets [...] Let's ensure that our personal data is owned by us and not by large corporations [...] Let's make computing easy again like it was in the past. Let's build apps that could communicate with each other.