Re:Background to Programming Erlang
by untothebreach on Wednesday June 25, 2014 @01:18PM
(#7945364)
I was surprised by that too, when I first subscribed to the erlang-questions ML. Recently he started a thread, "How would you implement a blob store?," and I thought it was so cool that the "BDFL" (so to speak) of the language was kicking off cool practical CS discussions like that. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, it's just not something I see a lot of other BDFLs doing.
Re:Background to Programming Erlang
by pessimizer on Wednesday June 25, 2014 @04:04PM
(#7946451)
I find him to be like a child in all of the best ways. So many master programmers never seem to stray far enough outside of their comfort zones to have to ask basic questions about anything. Armstrong always seems to be operating at the edges, trying to come up with something that's never been done before, but definitely doing something that he personally hasn't done before.
All of the old Ericsson Erlang guys seem a bit like that, though:) The right people were in the same place at the same time.
At his age a lot of people have switched to doing something else. But he is still programming, exploring, learning, is active in the community.
He would post questions to Erlang mailing lists like "how do I do consistent hashing" or "anyone know of why websockets do this or that", I think that is pretty cool.