Joe Armstrong has died • Hacker News Board

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#121

Post by tomjen3 » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

I am beginning to hate that black bar more and more.

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#122

Post by rapsey » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:01 PM UTC

brador wrote: post #39

Anyone know what he died of/from?

Since it was sudden, a stroke of some sort is generally the case.

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#123

Post by hsavit1 » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:04 PM UTC

We are all workers, and Joe was our Supervisor

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#124

Post by bobowzki » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:11 PM UTC

rapsey wrote: post #122

brador wrote: post #39

Anyone know what he died of/from?

Since it was sudden, a stroke of some sort is generally the case.

He was normally very active on twitter but I noticed he hasn't posted since the 10th of April, that's 10 days ago..

I guess it's only human nature to want to know what happened when someone you admired suddenly passed away.

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#125

Post by durandal1 » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:14 PM UTC

Possibly the most influential person in my programming career. Always curious, always full with ideas, but never lacking a pragmatic approach to the real world.

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#126

Post by michaelfeathers » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:21 PM UTC

Last year, I was at a conference giving a talk about error handling and Joe Armstrong was in the audience. I went through a bunch of strategies for mitigation and handling of errors and Joe yelled from the back "just let it crash! just let it crash!" I had to reply, "but we're not all using Erlang yet."

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#127

Post by ecthiender » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:40 PM UTC

This was really unexpected! I follow him on twitter and he was tweeting about FPGAs, which seems like, only few days back!

I am grieved.

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#128

Post by tigershark » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 7:57 PM UTC

tosh wrote: post #10

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

Thanks a lot, I never watched this, it’s absolutely awesome. I laughed a lot and I actually cried in the slide about legacy code when the first line was “programmers who wrote the code are dead” :(

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#129

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 8:18 PM UTC

The one guy who knew how to turn software into actual engineering.

Re: Joe Armstrong has died

#130

Post by jacquesm » Sat, Apr 20, 2019, 8:21 PM UTC

nextos wrote: post #40

dpeck wrote: post #9

That is so sad, he was in his late 60s and it seemed like he had a lot of life left in him, talking about how software can get better and having a great (and sometimes snarky) outlook on the profession. Highly recommend his thesis (2003) and a few of his great interviews/presentations for anyone who isn’t familiar with Joe, it captures a lot of what he thought about and pushed for in his professional life. http://erl…

I came here to say the same thing. His thesis is extremely readable and illuminating on the topic of reliable distributed systems.

It goes much further than that, it shows how to tackle reliability even in systems that are not distributed. The primary insight is that all software will be buggy so you need to bake reliability in from day one by assuming your work product will contain faults.