Joe Armstrong has died • Hacker News Board

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#201

Post by wyatwerp » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 6:08 AM UTC

alankay wrote: post #199

alankay wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rumors of my passing have been greatly exaggerated!

P.S. Joe and I have had the most wonderful conversations, right up to a few months ago. We'll miss him terribly and remember him vividly!

Foot in mouth there! For that, I apologize as profusely as possible online.

P.S: FWIW, I was thinking of John McCarthy there, must have gotten confused by recalling Joe Armstrong's interview with Alan Kay. I am also a big fan of Alan Kay, landing up at Erlang's doorstep after playing a little with Squeak.

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#202

Post by zubairq » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 10:08 AM UTC

Joe Armstrong's work on Erlang and OTP ended up inspiring a whole generation, and now Kubernetes and Istio are very much based on his work

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#203

Post by macintux » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

ignoramous wrote: post #108

Devastating. I'd like to point out a recent tweet @joeerl shared [0][1] that contained things he felt were good wisdom but lost over time: -- Ideas that we forgot: 1. Flow based programming. 2. Pipes. 3. Linda Tuple Spaces. 4. Hypertext (=/= HTML). Computer Science 101: 1. Observational equivalence. 2. Isolation. 3. Composition. 4. Causality. 5. Physics. Two papers to read: 1. The Emperor's Old Clothes - ACM. 2. A Pl…

When I first learned about Erlang, using it to implement tuple spaces was what immediately came to mind. I need to get back to that idea.

Thanks for sharing that. I've effectively abandoned Twitter but I need to go re-read his timeline once I think I can do it without too much sorrow.

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#204

Post by pmarreck » Thu, Apr 25, 2019, 3:48 AM UTC

narendraj9 wrote: post #89

pmarreck wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad I’m not the only one who wants to know

Yes, what exactly happened to him?

Pulmonary fibrosis.

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#205

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 12:05 AM UTC

tombert wrote: post #133

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…

[deleted]

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#206

Post by stephenamills » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 12:05 AM UTC

tombert wrote: post #133

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…

This only makes me want to cry.. I never got the opportunity to meet him but I will miss him so much. I've always known since high school that his work in certain ways just had no equal. The Open Telecom Platform is straightforwardly just a masterpiece of programming - it basically turns any server into this data processing god machine with almost no possibility of a (code) failure.