Joe Armstrong Quotes

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.

There is another word for really big comments: a book!

When we write code, we forgot about the bigger picture.

This is a thing that really scares me, are people developing large applications that they don’t understand.

It's going to fail your project if you take the easy bits first, deliberately. Because you can't solve the difficult bit, your project will fail late than failing early and your company will lose lots of money.

To me, programs are black boxes. You send a message in and you get a message out. I don't care if it's written in Scala or Haskell or Erlang or Python or Ruby. I care about this relationship between inputs and outputs.

One thing I wanted to do with Prolog, pick some sort of better things. Better stuff should happen when it fails. The other problem with prolog is that you could only do one thing, and you can only have one process. So I wanted and I thought Prolog was really great. I made an algebra to describe telephony in Prolog but the only trouble was you could only describe one process and if they didn't do what you'd expected them to do when you got failure, it didn't work.

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.

I was using Smalltalk and I never actually go through this boundary of sort of simulating the class structure in my head so that I can program itself. It was painful, I used to chose the changelog to find things, I regret you did it.

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.

In pure functional language, you are not allowed to tinker around with the state, So the state go into your function, something should happen and the state comes out as well. In pure functional language, you got in input and the state, and what's come out is the output and the new state.

If you have know idea where the leak is coming from, you'll want call a professional plumber who will have the equipment to locate the pipes in your walls [...] So, he's talking about software!

People are inventing new programming language all the time but I think that's not the big problem is actually writing programs. I think the big technical problem in building system is what I call "the connecting things together problem". It's a version nightmare problem. It's given things in different languages and actually connecting them together.

A technology that nobody use, just dies.

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