Joe Armstrong Quotes from "The How and Why of Fitting Things Together"
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The How and Why of Fitting Things Together
The How and Why of Fitting Things Together, Erlang User Conference 2013
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.
Erlang is like Meccano. Meccano is very good. You build wonderful things with meccano. C++ is like Lego. Lego is wonderful. But there is any glue. The glue that you want to use to glue Lego and Meccano just does not work.
This is fantastic, this a quantum leap in abstraction. Most people are being looking inside the black boxes and trying to understand how they work but I think they are looking at the wrong place. They should have been looking inside the black box to understand programming works and looks on the connected things to understand what do they do.
Everything is interesting, everything does connect, but anything don't work.
why do we write things from scratch all the time and reimplementing things? because it's quicker than finding another programming language that does it. We can't find this program, and if we find it, it does something slightly different to the one we wanted and it's quicker to rewrite a new program than modify the old program.
Joe's law: Frameworks grow in complexity until nobody can use them.
Messages are like files. We don't care how it was created.
Pipes are wonderful. They are doing wonderful things.
Bad ideas in computer science and anywhere are sticky. If the first idea was a bad idea, then because it works people will sort of repeat it.
The middle man brings conceptual integrity to the system.