Joe Armstrong Quotes
1950–2019 United States
Joseph Leslie Armstrong (27 December 1950 – 20 April 2019) was a computer scientist working in the area of fault-tolerant distributed systems.
- United States
- Computer scientists
Also known as: Joe Armstrong
Random Joe Armstrong quote
110 quotes
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.
The API we use in programming languages are not adequate for describing the order in which we can perform the API calls. They are basically useless.
Let me just say something about pipes. The great UNIX philosophy was: the output of my program should be the input to your program, to compile things together.
Modules change with time, and there is no sense of time in programming development. If you look at something like git, the way you deal with time is checksum, timestamp...
You can both kept fault tolerance and scalability. You can have both or none of them
Four languages to learn: C, Prolog, Erlang, Javascript.
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.
We can use Machine Learning to diagnose diseases and we don't need to use machine learning to target advertisements to people. We can use it to cure their cancers. Just think about that.
How many machines boot in 60 milliseconds? When did it come wrong?
Have we got better at programming things in the last 25 years? I think the answer would be no. They've been small improvements.
You're a programmer, you've just written 100 lines of codes that C++ programmers have failed to do. You want to show it to people because you're quite pleased. You think they're going to be pleased...
One way I think Erlang was a kind of software emulating Tandem machine.
We can't do a list of 20 things. You can't do 20 things in parallel. Do one of them. Do the next.
Pipelines is the most important word. So a Monad is a pipeline. It allows you to pipe an output of a function to the input of another function. They rediscover the pipe.
If you have know idea where the leak is coming from, you'll want call a professional plumber who will have the equipment to locate the pipes in your walls [...] So, he's talking about software!
Why do the designers to this programming language want correctness? It's because, if you write program in erlang, and it turns to be incorrect, I got the blame. But if it works you got the credit.
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.
you can basically make things as reliable as you by having lot of machines.
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.
So what's wrong with the shell? and what's wrong with Erlang? It's not LISP!