Joe Armstrong Quotes

How many machines boot in 60 milliseconds? When did it come wrong?

What's legacy code? That's dead programmers stuff, not only there are no comment in it, you can't ask people because they are dead. It written in languages that nobody understand, there is no specification and yet it works beautifully!

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.

I think things like PowerPoint have sort of destroyed creativity.

Many programs don’t have well-defined interface. They should have.

deployment is a problem because even if somebody made an open source privacy application, it needs 50 million users to take off. Apple and Google and everybody have dominated this way of deploying something to hundreds of millions of people [...] the first one to get a hundred million users wins basically.

In Haskell, C or Java, or any these languages, that function composition will fail at compile time. Type system will say: we'll not allow you to compose things together because the types are wrong. But in Erlang, you can do anything you bloody would feel like just found together and know it at run time not at compile time. Some people think that is not so good. Some people think that is pretty cool. I will tell you why it's pretty cool. It's actually late binding, it makes decision late.

This is a letter about a conference. Does it go in letter or in conferences? This is a categorization problem, as soon you put categories into things you don't know what category to use. This is the problem in object oriented programming, this is why object oriented programming is bloody stupid.

The different ways of hiding the state are the things that different functional programming languages offer. In Haskell they call it monads, in Erlang they call it processes.

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 we combine git and bittorrent we got gittorrent.

I do not think we can build systems that are large with large components.

Object Oriented Programming, this is the art of hiding side effects. If you can do it successfully you can write this in program. If you do it unsuccessfully, you get in a sucking mess.

I just want to model what’s going on in the real world

Object oriented programming asked you to put things into categories, into classes. Concurrency oriented programming asks you to identify the concurrency and the problem. The concurrence in the problem is a property of the real world. If you are doing real world modeling you can see it, you can smell it, you can eat it