Joe Armstrong (programmer)

“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.”

“Everything is interesting, everything does connect, but anything don't 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We are computer scientists, we are slaves who works for these big companies [Google, Facebook].”

“The other thing you have got to do is take the data out of the cloud and put it into your home cloud. Make your own home cloud.”

“I find it totally absurd that the word intellectual and property, those two things can be put into the same sentence and you connect intellectual property with property. As if an idea can be owned and if you can get money for it. It's not physical! Physical things, you can own! You can't own ideas!”

“[in the next 5, 10 or 15 years] I think we will see repressive states to try and stop technology. We will find free states try and promote it.”

“That's enormously interesting, the petabyte change because what's gonna happen is all human knowledge, every book that ever been written will fit into 138 terabytes of memory. That will mean the petabyte of memory can store all human knowledge and we can give it to every person on the planet. If we do that it's totally going to change society.”

“The terabyte boundary is going to cause movies to have the same status as films and digital books.”

“You know, there are two types of languages, there are languages that people bitch about and there are languages that nobody uses.”

“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.”

“API in programming languages is totally stupid because they do not capture order.”

“To me, programs are black boxes. You send a message in and you get a message out. I don't care if it's written in Scala or Haskell or Erlang or Python or Ruby. I care about this relationship between inputs and outputs.”

“I think we need to start describing configuration languages that describe how the thing is built and configured.”

“I think we have to think about how we can make systems out of very small components with very strictly defined protocols between them.”

“I don't think a program should be bigger than possibly 128 kilobytes, possibly 64 kilobytes. It should be possible to understand that program in its entirety.”

“I do not think we can build systems that are large with large components.”

“If I want to make a programming language, I would not make a programming language, I would make a protocol description language where you can formally describe protocols and you can formally validate the components are obeying the protocol. I put these between everything that communicates in a form of a contract and I would not like to serve contract violations.”