Joe Armstrong Quotes

Four good tools to learn: Emacs, Bash, Make and Shell. You could use Vi, I am not religious here. Make is pretty damn good! I use Make for everything, that good!

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.

Your first question must always be: what is the most difficult part of this problem that I am trying to solve and then try and solve that. If you can't solve the most difficult bit, give up! Seek advice, find somebody who can solve it!

We can't do a list of 20 things. You can't do 20 things in parallel. Do one of them. Do the next.

I can only implement one thing at a time. I'm a one thing at a time person. So, if you give me that huge list of things, I will implement the most important thing. Which is it?

If somebody puts a big list of things up, my question is always: what is the most important thing on that list.

How to make a list? Collecting the data, that's the easy bit. Sorting it into categories is slightly more difficult. Shortening the list is the most difficult part. That a really difficult problem.

The methodology for what I was going to do: ask some questions, get some replies, organize result, choose the best things to do.

Do we really need to hijack our attention systems every 10 seconds with a banner?

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.

Have we got better at programming things in the last 25 years? I think the answer would be no. They've been small improvements.

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 always imagine a historian in 2 or 300 years' time writing the history of this period. It would just be like the Dark Ages, the ages of confusion. Will it end with computer failures that kill millions of people or will it transition into something that is for the benefit of mankind? We don’t know at the moment and I don’t know how long it will be before we know.

Google knows everything about us but we know nothing about Google.

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.