I was crap at writing. I learned to ride. I wrote a few books and after, you written a few books, you get good at it. But I was really rubbish at wri… - Joe Armstrong

The spec does not tell me what to do. What do I program? [...] I thought this is crazy, we are building products with specifications and things, and the specifications doesn't say what's supposed to happen. Then when you get to this point in the code where you don't know what's going to happen, everybody knows how programs it. I thought that's crazy because I didn't know and I thought everybody could interpret that differently and they could make an ad-hoc decision. So I thought to myself, the only sensible thing to do is crash. We just crash this call because we don't know what to do.

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

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