SHAWORDS

The spec does not tell me what to do. What do I program? [...] I thoug — Joe Armstrong (programmer)

"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."
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Joe Armstrong (programmer)
Joe Armstrong (programmer)
author

Joseph Leslie Armstrong was a computer scientist working in the area of fault-tolerant distributed systems. He is one of the co-designers of the Erlang programming language.