Just re-watched his Strangeloop talk: “The mess we’re in”. Still so spot on. He will be dearly missed. https://youtube.com/watch?v=lKXe3HUG2l4
Guess I'm alone in not seeing what's so good about this talk. He only presents problems, and in an extremely disorganized way. The closest thing to a solution is "wait, hardware advancement will eventually make your slow code fast." It's definitely entertaining, but that's about all I can give it.
There's a time and place for things. Posting multiple critical comments in a commemoration thread is maybe not the best time or place, and better kept for later?
I had Joe as a lecturer in parallel Erlang back in January and February this year. Amazing person, seemed like he knew everything about computers. He told us that he was sick with lung fibrosis. His lungs capacity was at 50% something and kept shrinking every day. The last few lectures he was supposed to give got cancelled due to sickness. Got the news that he had passed today. A very sad day I must say.
I can't seem to find it; I am actually reaching out to a friend that I forwarded it to to see if he still has it.
I was able to find his reply. The stuff after the `>` is him quoting me. There's another part to this somewhere, but I'll have to keep looking. > Hello! > I am learning Erlang and really liking it. Great > I am finding myself really liking the immutability in regards to being able to reason about my code, but that leaves me with a probably easy question: why does immutability make concurrency easier? Tricky I guess i…
Back in 2015, I somehow ended up as part of a panel discussion at the end of a conference. The panel was going to include Joe Armstrong, Don Syme (inventor of F#), Tony Hoare (!), and myself (a nobody compared to any of them). During the conference, I wanted to meet each of the other folks on the panel, and ended up in a somewhat lengthy conversation with Joe Armstrong -- mostly about Erlang, but at some point the pa…
Not at all hard to believe that he was sincere. He seemed to be pretty starstruck when he was interviewing Alan Kay on stage just three years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhOHn9TClXY .
I was about to share this youtube channel, it has lots of wonderful videos with him - this particular one is a great example.
I was able to find his reply. The stuff after the `>` is him quoting me. There's another part to this somewhere, but I'll have to keep looking. > Hello! > I am learning Erlang and really liking it. Great > I am finding myself really liking the immutability in regards to being able to reason about my code, but that leaves me with a probably easy question: why does immutability make concurrency easier? Tricky I guess i…
Ah, found the email he responded to a year later. As before, the stuff after the > is him quoting me. ---------------------------------------- > Hello! > > Just under a year ago I send you a message asking you about multi-process computing and the like. You gave me a long, detailed email that not only answered my questions, but also explained in pretty-decent detail. > > I was so impressed by that email that I actual…
Please consider sharing this email exchange with lettersofnote.com. I am not affiliated in any way with that site, but I have found it to be a great source of inspiration and a reminder that very successful people are still people, and often very approachable and kind people. Reading this sort of thing can restore one's faith in humanity, and provide impetus to change one's own behavior towards kindness and generosity.
Years ago I emailed Joe Armstrong about concurrency stuff. I had no idea about anything like multithreaded programming or distributed systems or anything like that, but I had read Erlang was a language well-suited for that stuff. I sent an email asking some seriously noobey questions about concurrency (about why mutation was bad, what made the Actor model work, etc), and instead of a response like "Go read a book and…
Same. Him and I discussed distributed storage. Well detailed response from him that sent me reading for days. I aspire to be like him.
I would love to read that if you can find the emails. He always had a unique perspective on this stuff.
Guess I'm alone in not seeing what's so good about this talk. He only presents problems, and in an extremely disorganized way. The closest thing to a solution is "wait, hardware advancement will eventually make your slow code fast." It's definitely entertaining, but that's about all I can give it.
There's a time and place for things. Posting multiple critical comments in a commemoration thread is maybe not the best time or place, and better kept for later?
The post is about the talk, not the man. The comment is about the talk, not the man.
I kind of doubt Joe Armstrong would support N days of mourning requiring uncritical acceptance of everything he's ever done.
Joe called things like he saw them. I think we better honor him by doing the same.