Joe Armstrong has died

Re:Joe Armstrong has died by sytelus on Saturday April 20, 2019 @11:32PM (#19710393)

It occurs to me that this is one fundamental commonality across great people that includes likes of Einstein to Feynman to Knuth to Erdos. They can sense the curiosity of a person regardless of their background or expertise and cannot prevent themselves from infecting you with the fundamental joy of discovering nature's secrets. Passion is something they feel obligated to spread even if you are just a gardner or a cook or a high school student while they happen to be towering figures with Nobel or Field medals. If you have that email, please do share!

And RIP indeed.

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Re:Joe Armstrong has died by tombert on Sunday April 21, 2019 @12:29AM (#19710546)

I actually did share that email in a sister thread; I also wrote about it specifically in a blog post [1] if you don't want to traverse through the comments.

I completely agree with your thesis. I was a recent college dropout, and Joe's enthusiasm about Erlang, distributed programming, and pretty much everything else about computers was really a good springboard for self-education.

[1] https://medium.com/@tombert/rip-joe-armstrong-b6252ff93654

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Re:Joe Armstrong has died by johnhpatton on Sunday April 21, 2019 @06:55AM (#19711510)

Thanks for sharing that experience. This matches my interactions with him at a couple conferences. Always willing to spend a moment explaining things to anyone. I had the pleasure of drinking beer with him at one of them and he was genuinely excited when I asked to have him sign my erlang book. His Twitter was one of the few I followed. His teachings and musings changed how I view software engineering. He will be missed.

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