Joe Armstrong: Thing

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“The methodology for what I was going to do: ask some questions, get some replies, organize result, choose the best things to do.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”