Joe Armstrong
Swedish-based software engineer (1950 to 2019) who co-created the Erlang programming language and wrote Programming Erlang.
Joe Armstrong did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsMarkdown really sucks, I'll grant you that it's useful, there's no doubt about that but the lack of a standard, and the fact that no two markdown convertors do the same thing is terrible.
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Our reading
Their wordsLaTeX is better than markdown by far, but it has a fundamental flaw.
- 8 weeks earlier
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Their wordsIn this article I argue that monolithic GitHub projects, inflexible organizational structures and sequential programming languages all lead to bad software architectures.
↗The unintentional side effects of a bad concurrency modeljoearms.github.io 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsLater, I moved to different projects and discovered that the software architecture follows the organizational structure.
↗The unintentional side effects of a bad concurrency modeljoearms.github.io 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 24 months earlier
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Their wordsWith these added constraints programming becomes extremely difficult.
↗Why programming is difficultjoearms.github.io 1st of 2 in this piece
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Our reading
Programs that have to be maintained must have beautiful, well-documented inputs and code.
Their wordsFor program that have to be maintained the opposite to the last scenario is true. The inputs to the program and the program itself must be beautiful and well-documented.
↗Why programming is difficultjoearms.github.io 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 9 months earlier
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Our reading
The programmer’s error message should hold a lot of information and go to a permanent log file.
Their wordsIt should provide a heck of a lot of information, which should be put into a permanent log file, and from which it should be possible to do a post-mortem debugging of the program to see what went wrong.
↗Fail fast and noisely, fail politelyjoearms.github.io 1st of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
A failing program should show its user a polite error message, preferably with an apology.
Their wordsA polite error message should be shown to the poor unsuspecting user of the program, preferably with a grovelling apology for wasting their time.
↗Fail fast and noisely, fail politelyjoearms.github.io 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsIf a web site powered by PHP fails to work because it can't connect to a SQL database I don't want to know - really, I don't want to know, I am totally uninterested in this.
↗Fail fast and noisely, fail politelyjoearms.github.io 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 4 weeks earlier
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Their wordsWe (that is Erlang folks) are solving the right problem, the rest of the world (non Erlang people) are solving the wrong problem.
↗Solving the wrong problemjoearms.github.io 1st of 2 in this piece
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Their wordsThe road to automatic parallelisation of sequential programs is littered with corpses. It can't be done.
↗Solving the wrong problemjoearms.github.io 2nd of 2 in this piece