Joe Armstrong Quotes

The terabyte boundary is going to cause movies to have the same status as films and digital books.

You know, there are two types of languages, there are languages that people bitch about and there are languages that nobody uses.

The API we use in programming languages are not adequate for describing the order in which we can perform the API calls. They are basically useless.

API in programming languages is totally stupid because they do not capture order.

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.

I think we need to start describing configuration languages that describe how the thing is built and configured.

I think we have to think about how we can make systems out of very small components with very strictly defined protocols between them.

I don't think a program should be bigger than possibly 128 kilobytes, possibly 64 kilobytes. It should be possible to understand that program in its entirety.

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

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.

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.

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 don't like the fact programmers are isolated. I hate all these git rubbish stuff. I mean, this is horrible because it makes you think that programmers are individuals and not part of a community. It makes them thinks that what they are doing is isolated.

I have a problem with categorization problem because I cannot say this thing got to be in that module or that class.

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