Quotes from the Erlang world

The following are various quotes from the Erlang/OTP world that encapsulate this wonderful language and community.

Some are quotes from the founders of the language or the actor-model PLT, while others are from various commandos of the language.

Shared memory is the root of all evil.

―Joe Armstrong

There’s an old anecdote of a company that moved a bunch of servers from London to another continent, booted them up, and the app was mysteriously slow. Come to find out, they had accidentally left the database server behind, and Erlang was seamlessly accessing it across the internet with appropriate speed penalty. Made for confusing debugging.

―Felix Gallow

Any sufficiently complicated concurrent program in another language contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Erlang.

―Robert Virding

It seems that everyone is talking about Haskell, but they’re using Erlang.

―Ulf Wiger

The right thing to do is to stop worrying and learn to love reverse! It will let you write the main algorithm in a clearer way, which will typically turn out to be more efficient, even if you have to include a call to reverse at the end.

―Richard Carlsson

Joe and I knew very little about telecoms when we came [to Ericsson to invent Erlang]. We could make a telephone call and that’s about it.

―Robert Virding

Had the Matrix been written in Erlang, clearly, Agent Smith would have won!

―Dave Thomas

Erlang’s syntax [sic] is ugly, clunky and cumbersome. Make no mistake though: Tanks are ugly, clunky and cumbersome. It does not make tanks less menacing.

―Jesper Louis Andersen

Java is an industry. Erlang is a programming language.

―Joe Armstrong

S/W development is an art, not a science. If you’re going to produce art, you need the best tools; Erlang.

―Mike Williams

The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.

―Joe Armstrong

Sending a message to an actor is entirely free of side effects [sic]. Being free of side effects allows a maximum of parallelism and allows an actor to be involved in several conversations at the same time without being confused.

―Carl Hewitt

Immutability -> Concurrency -> Distribution -> Reliability & Scalability.

―Francesco Cesarini

Frameworks grow in complexity until nobody can use them.

―Joe Armstrong

I don’t even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.

―Umberto Eco