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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Files and systems they mutate all the time.

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.

If I want to make a programming language, I would not make a programming language, I would make a protocol description language where you can formally describe protocols and you can formally validate the components are obeying the protocol. I put these between everything that communicates in a form of a contract and I would not like to serve contract violations.

PHP, brilliant language! Apart from the syntax and the semantics. Because it takes a view that will perform everything in one place.

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

In order to handle failure, you need two machines. [...] You have to be interested in distributed programming. You have to be interesting in parallel computing. You have to be interested in concurrent programming.

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.

The nice thing about the Erlang documentation is everything is done in XML. XML is absolutely brilliant for marking up text.

Computing was about controlling complexity and we have failed miserably.

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

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

When I write code I always think somebody else must have written this before me and I can't find it. Why do we write code if we can't find it with Google. If we can't really find it, then we can write the code. Lot of the code is pain in the arse, it's just boring stuff.

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.

We wanted to build big distributed systems, fault tolerant systems. The sort of systems that everybody wants to build today. It's not just about telecom. At the time it was just about telecom but now, it's not just about telecom. Virtually, every big systems you want to build has to do these things. You want to connect millions of people and you don't want if the system fail in anyway, you don't want these individual transaction to be broken. We started to working on that, way back. That sort of way we got Erlang.

We could of course redefine compose to a version of compose that work with debugging with debugging things. That would be horrible. That would mean we would need to compose pure functions. We would need to compose functions for debugging and everything on the planet.