Joe Armstrong Quotes

I think software are getting worse and worse in time.

I will never ever make any statement about performance that is not based on measurement and I will never ever advise anybody on how to write their code without saying write it and measure. I just will not speculate. I think people who do speculate about this should not speculate about it and they should write it, run it and measure it.

In Erlang, you have as many processes you want. You can arrange the processes observing each other. If you have got half million processes to do something, what is it matter if few thousand of them fail?

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.

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.

Let me just say something about pipes. The great UNIX philosophy was: the output of my program should be the input to your program, to compile things together.

Four languages to learn: C, Prolog, Erlang, Javascript.

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

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.

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

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

The clarity of programming languages have several advantages over traditional languages. For example, programs in such languages are considerably shorter than the equivalent programs in imperative languages. They also encourage clear programming styles.

The spec does not tell me what to do. What do I program? [...] I thought this is crazy, we are building products with specifications and things, and the specifications doesn't say what's supposed to happen. Then when you get to this point in the code where you don't know what's going to happen, everybody knows how programs it. I thought that's crazy because I didn't know and I thought everybody could interpret that differently and they could make an ad-hoc decision. So I thought to myself, the only sensible thing to do is crash. We just crash this call because we don't know what to do.

Shared memory is evil.

If you managed to scale horizontally, you can scale.