distributed systems

• I think the Net is scaling very well. Because of the way it was designed, I don't think it will come to its knees and crash. I see it as very organic in the way it's capable of living and reproducing itself.

  — Nicholas Negroponte

• I wanted to build fault tolerant systems and pretty soon I realized that you can’t make a fault tolerant system on a computer, because I think in the entire computer might crash, so I needed lots of independent computers.

  — Joe Armstrong

• The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

  — John Gilmore

• Two phases commit breaks laws of physics.

  — Joe Armstrong

• Transparency is valuable, but while many things can be made transparent in distributed objects, performance isn't usually one of them.

  — Martin Fowler

• Most apparent conspiracies result from consistent local self-interest with no need for global coordination.

  — Patri Friedman

• TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

  — Jon Postel

• If you can't detect failures, you are unable to recover from them. That's an obvious principle you need.

  — Joe Armstrong

• The fundamental limitation of [computer] cloud is who owns the off-switch.

  — George Hotz

• We need to build a world where there are parallel processes communicating through message passing and I thought they cannot have shared memory because if they have shared memory and the remote going to be the crash.

  — Joe Armstrong

• The Internet for us was like air. It was there all the time — you wouldn't notice it existed unless it was missing.

  — Nicholas Negroponte

• In Plan 9, the key abstraction is the file system—anything you can read and write and select by names in a hierarchy—and the protocol exports that abstraction to remote channels to enable distribution.

  — Ken Thompson

• It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign. ... Somebody is saying this is inevitable—and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.

  — Richard Stallman

• Defensive programming in C, is only necessary because you have only have a single thread of computation. If you have a sequential language and it crashes, you lost everything.

  — Joe Armstrong

• Fragmentation is like classful addressing -- an interesting early architectural error that shows how much experimentation was going on while IP was being designed.

  — Paul Vixie

• If the entire computer crashes, you're screwed. you can't really do fault tolerant computation from one machine.

  — Joe Armstrong

• A lot of systems actually break the laws of physics.

  — Joe Armstrong

• The 'name' of a resource indicates what we seek, an 'address' indicates where it is, and a 'route' tells us how to get there.

  — John Shoch

• In Erlang, you have as many processes you want. You can arrange the processes observing each other. If you have got half million processes to do something, what is it matter if few thousand of them fail?

  — Joe Armstrong

• If you do something and it fails you can do it again, it will work the second time. That's because quite often you are using something underneath where you've missed a message or messages are coming in wrong order.

  — Joe Armstrong