Joe Armstrong (programmer)

“Computer systems fail. We have to deal with it, we can't ignore it.”

“What did it work for this guy and not for me? Well, it's because machines were in different states when we performed those operations. The number of possible state of the machine is a really great number.”

“The number of states of three variables in javascript could have is greater of the total number of the atoms of the planet.”

“Sometimes changing one line of legacy code is incredibly difficult than totally rewriting the entire stuff.”

“What's legacy code? That's dead programmers stuff, not only there are no comment in it, you can't ask people because they are dead. It written in languages that nobody understand, there is no specification and yet it works beautifully!”

“If you don't have a book, you don't know how a bloody program work!”

“There is another word for really big comments: a book!”

“Comments are really good, so I would advise you to write comments. Write really big and expensive comments.”

“We should get the Congressional Medal for creating employments because we have created billions of man hours of maintenance work for people in the future. We are the job creators of the future.”

“I think software are getting worse and worse in time.”

“How many machines boot in 60 milliseconds? When did it come wrong?”

“The Middle man is the thing that imposed Erlang only in the Erlang world. If people try to talk to each other, the complexity of the program is O(N²). But, if we put middle men here, this turns the complexity to O(N).”

“Middle men, this is the key abstraction in Erlang. This is the model of the world. Everything in the world is processes. When ever you got any problem what so ever, it does not matter what was of problem is, you put this transducer thing in the middle. It translate the way things talk to each other in the outside world and internally.”

“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!”

“In Erlang, F(G(X)) is used for small steps. Pipes are used for big steps. The big steps semantics is processes. It's messages between processes. Processes are used for big computation. When you got F(G(X)) is a small step, and we map small steps on the same core. We map big steps on processes. Processes map on multi-core. The system just does it for you.”

“The nice thing about pipeline is that quite easy to see and you can do all the steps in the pipeline in parallel.”

“Instead of handy compose, we'll keep compose exactly the same and will write a little function which takes a function that does not have debugging and return the function that does debugging. And we have a function that accept only one argument, the un-debugging version, we'll add another little function that automatically add an argument to it. When we done that, we can bind call compose on it and everything will work and will be nice. And will be peace on the earth and everybody will have a good time.”

“We could of course redefine compose to a version of compose that work with debugging with debugging things. That would be horrible. That would mean we would need to compose pure functions. We would need to compose functions for debugging and everything on the planet.”

“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.”

“The different ways of hiding the state are the things that different functional programming languages offer. In Haskell they call it monads, in Erlang they call it processes.”