Joe Armstrong Quotes

“The inability to isolate software components from each other is the main reason why many popular programming languages cannot be used for making robust system software.”

“Documents are full of paragraphs. But the paragraphs don't have name. So, we can't talk about the paragraphs.”

“When we write code, we forgot about the bigger picture.”

“I don't like modules. It's a sort of love/hate relationship. The problem with modules is the classification problem. When you have written a function you don't know in what modules you put it in.”

“Bad ideas in computer science and anywhere are sticky. If the first idea was a bad idea, then because it works people will sort of repeat it.”

“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.”

“I think things like PowerPoint have sort of destroyed creativity.”

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

“Messages are like files. We don't care how it was created.”

“Everything is interesting, everything does connect, but anything don't work.”

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

“Pipes are wonderful. They are doing wonderful things.”

“A technology that nobody use, just dies.”

“I am the world's worst C programmer because it's so complicated I can't understand it [...] All I know is that whenever I write C, my pointers are always missed by one from where they're supposed to go.”

“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.”

“Shared memory is evil.”

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I was using Smalltalk and I never actually go through this boundary of sort of simulating the class structure in my head so that I can program itself. It was painful, I used to chose the changelog to find things, I regret you did it.”