We’ve reached the end of term again on The Morning Paper, and I’ll be taking a two week break. The Morning Paper will resume on Tuesday 7th May (since Monday 6th is a public holiday in the UK).
My end of term tradition is to highlight a few of the papers from the term that I especially enjoyed, but this time around I want to let one work stand alone:
- Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors, Joe Armstrong, December 2003.
You might also enjoy “The Mess We’re In,” and Joe’s seven deadly sins of programming:
- Code even you cannot understand a week after you wrote it – no comments
- Code with no specifications
- Code that is shipped as soon as it runs and before it is beautiful
- Code with added features
- Code that is very very fast very very very obscure and incorrect
- Code that is not beautiful
- Code that you wrote without understanding the problem
We’re in an even bigger mess without you Joe. Thank you for everything. RIP.