Joe Armstrong Quotes

If you imagine the combination of petabytes memories with LiFi and communication at tens of gigabits per second but the combination and like 10,000 Cray-Ones and a little thing like your fingernail everywhere in every single light bulb that’s like an atomic bomb hitting software. What we’re going to do with it, nobody’s got a clue.

One of the things we’ve forgotten, is the importance of protocols and not describing them accurately.

People keep telling me this, "you’ve got to upgrade your operating system". Then they say, "Well, that’s because of security things." I don’t really have much confidence in them. If they said we have to change it once every 20 years, I could believe that it was reliable, but telling me that I have to change it once every six weeks is crazy.

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.

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

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

Why are people just moving the data and not the programs. We could move both of them to some intermediate point in the middle to perform the computation there.

We need to build a world where there are parallel processes communicating through message passing and I thought they cannot have shared memory because if they have shared memory and the remote going to be the crash.

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

"Messages take time", and they propagate through space, there’s no guarantee it gets there.

I wanted to build fault tolerant systems and pretty soon I realized that you can’t make a fault tolerant system on a computer, because I think in the entire computer might crash, so I needed lots of independent computers.