Joe Armstrong Quotes

British computer scientist (1950-2019)

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Joseph Leslie Armstrong (27 December 1950 – 20 April 2019) was a computer scientist working in the area of fault-tolerant distributed systems.

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Birth Name: Joseph Leslie Armstrong

Also Known As: Joe

Alternative Names: Joseph Armstrong

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Our goal is actually to have about 75% utilization if we had one hundred CPU we would hope that our program will go 75% faster without tweaking it.

Processes are isolated by design. Context switching are very lightweight. The processes by design cannot damage each other.

We need to know why things fails. If we want to improve our system, we need to put that information into that system into logs or something.

If you can't detect failures, you are unable to recover from them. That's an obvious principle you need.

Bad concurrency model, I think, is something that make a lot of programming artificially difficult.

The cornerstones of fault tolerant programming are to isolate errors to make sure if one thing crash it does not crash anything else. That's what the processes in operating system do.

In Erlang, you have as many processes you want. You can arrange the processes observing each other. If you have got half million processes to do something, what is it matter if few thousand of them fail?

Defensive programming in C, is only necessary because you have only have a single thread of computation. If you have a sequential language and it crashes, you lost everything.

Shared memory is evil.

You can both kept fault tolerance and scalability. You can have both or none of them

If you managed to scale horizontally, you can scale.

One way I think Erlang was a kind of software emulating Tandem machine.

In order to handle failure, you need two machines. [...] You have to be interested in distributed programming. You have to be interesting in parallel computing. You have to be interested in concurrent programming.

One of the things which worries me is the silly idea with the cloud. If we just store everything in the cloud, the unintentional side effect of that is we will probably lose all our history. And I am kind of worry to life. two hundred years time and look back and say just sorry, we just lost all the history of the last twenty centuries.

Every Erlang process in the universe should be addressable, and trace backed if we wish they will talk together.