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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




“It said I didn’t have grunt installed. So I googled a bit, and I found out what grunt was. Grunt is ... I still don’t really know what it is.”

Delivered that line with perfect timing and humility. What a great sense of humor!


"And then we've got this sort of dichotomy between efficiency and clarity. You know, to make something clearer, you add a layer of abstraction and to make it more efficient you remove a layer of abstraction. So go for the clarity bit. Wait ten years and it will be a thousand times faster, you want it a million times faster, wait 20 years."


That's... one way to make something clearer. It's also a way to hide complexity behind leaky facades. "Just add a layer of abstraction" is horrible advice.


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” :(


Indeed. So much substance in such a short time.

- clarity vs efficuency on abstraction

- the need to unwind (not sure if it is the right word) entropy

- naming and comments

- etc

Things were not so obvious to me when just started my career but are so important to software engineer's day to day

RIP Joe. Your ideas will live with us, forever


It is a great talk. Based on that I took his course on Erlang at FutureLearn, which was also very good. Sadly, when I sent that link to some colleagues at work they shrugged and have since kept adding more and more dependencies and complexity to the front-end build. It's very hard to stop momentum once it's got going, culturally.


I just watched that for the first time the other day. Such a good talk.


Now that is a beautifl mind!!


Always liked his reference to GruntJS[0]

[0] https://gruntjs.com/


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.


The idea of "no copies – everything exists in one place and has a unique ID" was new to me. I still don't know if it's a good idea, let alone practicable, but it's great food for thought!




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