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

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

This was actually fast to build the prototypes of the telephony system but they were running very slowly. at that stage we said: let's make a product out of this. We thought the semantics were okay but the performance wasn't.

If you do project that guaranteed to succeed, think it could be horribly conservative things. So you can't just do things. You know tat hundred are just fun stuffs and they gonna fails!

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.

Modules change with time, and there is no sense of time in programming development. If you look at something like git, the way you deal with time is checksum, timestamp...

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

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.

Meta-Programming Erlang is not really easy because of the way the trees are parsed.

What did it work for this guy and not for me? Well, it's because machines were in different states when we performed those operations. The number of possible state of the machine is a really great number.

I think we have to think about how we can make systems out of very small components with very strictly defined protocols between them.

Joe's law: Frameworks grow in complexity until nobody can use them.

I don't like the fact programmers are isolated. I hate all these git rubbish stuff. I mean, this is horrible because it makes you think that programmers are individuals and not part of a community. It makes them thinks that what they are doing is isolated.

The number of states of three variables in javascript could have is greater of the total number of the atoms of the planet.

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