Goodbye Joe

Fred probably forgot to mention it, but Joe, Mike, and Robert starred in a short film Erlang: The Movie, a very fine and concise demonstration of fault-tolerance of Erlang.

The film has some magic power that I cannot describe but made me watching it over and over again.

YouTube link to the film with fixed audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXmOlCy0oBM

I discovered Erlang and Joe around 2008, and it made rethink everything I knew about programming. The BEAM has now become my favorite development environment. I always wanted to meet Joe. His brilliance, his jokes on stage, his way of mumbling and walk all around the stage and getting excited at things were amazing. Let it crash.

"Rather than thinking software is never finished, he wanted software that was so simple it could actually be completed. The strength of your program should be from how extensible and composable its usage would be, not your ability to never be done writing it. On top of that, he wanted code to keep working forever."

I never met Joe, but he was also a huge inspiration to me, for a lot of the same reasons you touched on.

His blog is filled with write-ups of tiny projects of his, all of them humble and always written with the goal of crafting beautiful systems. Anyone could do worse than reading everything he's written.

Thanks for sharing this. I'm glad to know that one of my heroes was as wonderful offline as he was online :)

Joe Armstrong's passing is tragic. I never him, but he also inspired my own thinking as a software engineer. Even though Erlang is a language from the 1980s, it still feels like something from the future. I have only ever appreciated Erlang from afar, but it seems to embody what programming languages should be for building complex software systems. I enjoyed his talks quite a lot; he always brimmed with passion and life which I hope to maintain at his age. He was never old mentally or in attitude, which was infectious.

I regret not having had the opportunity to meet Joe, but my impression was always that he was that exceptionally rare kind of person who exuded not just heaps of wisdom and knowledge, but also heaps of humility and friendliness. Joe will be missed, but fondly remembered and - I would hope - exemplified and emulated as a positive role model. Even without me having met him, Joe made me a better programmer.

Goodbye, Joe. May your supervisor spawn new processes to carry on your legacy.

Such a good piece, written far, far too soon. Thank you, Fred.

Never met @joeerl , but Joe Armstrong made a huge influence on me as a software developer. Erlang/OTP/The Beam changed everything for me. THANK YOU JOE for your contributions, amazing talks and being Joe. We will keep "Letting it Crash"

Wonderful, Fred. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for sharing about Joe. I have only met Joe a couple times in Erlang BEAM conference and I can say that is how my memory of him as well.

Great piece Fred

I really wish more people would find the great work of Joe called Erlang.

Unfortunately, I feel like the raw performance scores on the various benchmark websites (which show Erlang near last) is a major contributor to the small’sh adoption.

Erlang really needs an initiate like Ruby’s 3x3. Where they are striving to 3x the perf of Ruby

whoa didn't know Joe Armstrong passed away...

Still remember learning Erlang with his book and listening to him on podcasts talking about concurrency about a decade ago... Erlang is not my daily driver, but learninng Erlang's actor concurrency model has shaped my view on concurrency and functional programming... For that, thank you Joe and RIP.

What a wonderful description of Joe. Sad to say goodbye to one of the people who laid the foundations of modern computer programming.

What a marvelous eulogy and legacy.

RIP Joe.