Joe Armstrong (programmer)

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

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

"We need to build a world where there are parallel processes communicating through message passing and I thought they cannot have shared memory because if they have shared memory and the remote going to be the crash."

"Why are people just moving the data and not the programs. We could move both of them to some intermediate point in the middle to perform the computation there."

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

"Many programs don’t have well-defined interface. They should have."

"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."

"People keep telling me this, "you’ve got to upgrade your operating system". Then they say, "Well, that’s because of security things." I don’t really have much confidence in them. If they said we have to change it once every 20 years, I could believe that it was reliable, but telling me that I have to change it once every six weeks is crazy."

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

"If you imagine the combination of petabytes memories with LiFi and communication at tens of gigabits per second but the combination and like 10,000 Cray-Ones and a little thing like your fingernail everywhere in every single light bulb that’s like an atomic bomb hitting software. What we’re going to do with it, nobody’s got a clue."

"deployment is a problem because even if somebody made an open source privacy application, it needs 50 million users to take off. Apple and Google and everybody have dominated this way of deploying something to hundreds of millions of people [...] the first one to get a hundred million users wins basically."

"Google knows everything about us but we know nothing about Google."

"I always imagine a historian in 2 or 300 years' time writing the history of this period. It would just be like the Dark Ages, the ages of confusion. Will it end with computer failures that kill millions of people or will it transition into something that is for the benefit of mankind? We don’t know at the moment and I don’t know how long it will be before we know."

"I had a plan. Learn Emacs. Learn UNIX. And learn programming language. What happened? I didn't learn Emacs. I didn't learn UNIX. And I invented a new programming language."

"Have we got better at programming things in the last 25 years? I think the answer would be no. They've been small improvements."

"I started programming in like 76. There was not enough stuff. There was Fortran and Cobol... And Fortran. Now there's 250, 500, 800 programming languages, one new each week."

"Do we really need to hijack our attention systems every 10 seconds with a banner?"

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

"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."

"If somebody puts a big list of things up, my question is always: what is the most important thing on that list."

"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?"

"We can't do a list of 20 things. You can't do 20 things in parallel. Do one of them. Do the next."

"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!"

"It's going to fail your project if you take the easy bits first, deliberately. Because you can't solve the difficult bit, your project will fail late than failing early and your company will lose lots of money."

"Four good tools to learn: Emacs, Bash, Make and Shell. You could use Vi, I am not religious here. Make is pretty damn good! I use Make for everything, that good!"

"Better algorithms probably gave us a factor of 6 in performance. Changing the programming language going to Prolog to C, that gave us a factor of 15. All the rest comes from hardware. So, wait 10 years, you've got a thousand. wait 20, you get a million in hardware performance."

"If you try to fiddle around with your code to make it efficient, that's the wrong thing to do. Keep on track with the latest hardware. That's the right thing to do."

"Four languages to learn: C, Prolog, Erlang, Javascript."

"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."

"These [pipes] are killed by GUIs. So you don't have a text flow into a GUI. So, that are GUIs, you can't pipe it together in sequences. That's killed the notion of a pipe and the notion of reusing things."

"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."

"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 writing to start."

"PHP, brilliant language! Apart from the syntax and the semantics. Because it takes a view that will perform everything in one place."

"Helping your non-technical neighbor. Tell them it's not your fault. Tell them it's crap software and I don't understand this crap."

"Things can be small. They don't have to be gigabytes."

"The web is totally broken. It's not symmetric.Easy to read stuff, very difficult to write stuff. We ave a community of users who engage passively by reading stuff, they do not write stuff."

"Let's unbreak the web. The web is broken. Let's go out and un-break it and let's bring computation back to these supercomputers that we've got in our pockets [...] Let's ensure that our personal data is owned by us and not by large corporations [...] Let's make computing easy again like it was in the past. Let's build apps that could communicate with each other."

"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."

"I got this Prolog system, and I thought, let's do a message passing object model there. There were an influence with CSP."

"If you do project that guaranteed to succeed, think it could be horribly conservative things. So you can't just do things. You know tat hundred are just fun stuffs and they gonna fails!"

"Every Erlang process in the universe should be addressable, and trace backed if we wish they will talk together."

"One of the things which worries me is the silly idea with the cloud. If we just store everything in the cloud, the unintentional side effect of that is we will probably lose all our history. And I am kind of worry to life. two hundred years time and look back and say just sorry, we just lost all the history of the last twenty centuries."

"In order to handle failure, you need two machines. [...] You have to be interested in distributed programming. You have to be interesting in parallel computing. You have to be interested in concurrent programming."

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

"If you managed to scale horizontally, you can scale."

"You can both kept fault tolerance and scalability. You can have both or none of them"

"Shared memory is evil."

"Defensive programming in C, is only necessary because you have only have a single thread of computation. If you have a sequential language and it crashes, you lost everything."

"In Erlang, you have as many processes you want. You can arrange the processes observing each other. If you have got half million processes to do something, what is it matter if few thousand of them fail?"

"I wanted to build fault tolerant systems and pretty soon I realized that you can’t make a fault tolerant system on a computer, because I think in the entire computer might crash, so I needed lots of independent computers."