Joe Armstrong Quotes from "A Few Improvement to Erlang"
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A Few Improvement to Erlang
From A Few Improvement to Erlang, Erlang User Conference 2012
I could not understand how people could have get started with PHP because there was not message at all.
I thought if you multiply two integers together, you get an integer. But apparently you don't in PHP. You get a floating point number, which gets bigger and bigger and that's okay. Until you get to factorial(171), and then you get "INF". I don't know what "INF" is. I think it's infinity actually. But in that case, it's probably wrong, because infinity is awfully big. Bigger than factorial(171).
So what's wrong with the shell? and what's wrong with Erlang? It's not LISP!
Meta-Programming Erlang is not really easy because of the way the trees are parsed.
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.
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...
When we write code, we forgot about the bigger picture.
Finally after hours of googling, I can write my program. That what's I call research. The research takes 3 hours, writing the program takes 2 minutes, for the final version. You publish the program, and you throw away the research. That's not smart. Somebody later cannot figure out how you did it because all he's see is the end result.
The nice thing about the Erlang documentation is everything is done in XML. XML is absolutely brilliant for marking up text.
Documents are full of paragraphs. But the paragraphs don't have name. So, we can't talk about the paragraphs.