Joe Armstrong (programmer)

"Computer systems fail. We have to deal with it, we cant ignore it."

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

"So whats wrong with the shell? and whats wrong with Erlang? Its not LISP!"

"The spec does not tell me what to do. What do I program? [...] I thought this is crazy, we are building products with specifications and things, and the specifications doesnt say whats supposed to happen. Then when you get to this point in the code where you dont know whats going to happen, everybody knows how programs it. I thought thats crazy because I didnt know and I thought everybody could interpret that differently and they could make an ad-hoc decision. So I thought to myself, the only sensible thing to do is crash. We just crash this call because we dont know what to do."

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

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

"I will never ever make any statement about performance that is not based on measurement and I will never ever advise anybody on how to write their code without saying write it and measure. I just will not speculate. I think people who do speculate about this should not speculate about it and they should write it, run it and measure it."

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

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

"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."

"I had a plan. Learn Emacs. Learn UNIX. And learn programming language. What happened? I didnt learn Emacs. I didnt learn UNIX. And I invented a new programming language."

"I dont think a program should be bigger than possibly 128 kilobytes, possibly 64 kilobytes. It should be possible to understand that program in its entirety."