354: A Life of Learning

We celebrate the life of Erlang author Dr Joe Armstrong by remembering his many contributions to computer science and unique approach to lifelong learning.

Plus some code to read, your feedback, and more!

Links:

• Elastic Beanstalk Retirement — Feedback from Sekhar
• Professional development — Question from Ashetyn
• Francesco Cesarini on Twitter — It is with great sadness that I share news of Joe Armstrong's passing away earlier today. Whilst he may no longer be with us, his work has laid the foundation which will be used by generations to come. RIP @joeerl, thank you for inspiring us all.
• Goodbye Joe — One of the amazing things Joe mentioned in his texts that was out of the ordinary compared to everything I had read before is that developers would make mistakes and we could not prevent them all. Instead, we had to be able to cope with them. He did not just tell you about a language, he launched you on a trail that taught you how to write entire systems
• Goodbye Joe in r/programming — About two weeks ago I came across Armstrong's blog for the first time and poked around at a few posts. I noticed he had recently (in the past year was my impression) discovered TiddlyWiki and rewritten his blog in it. His post talking about his eureka moment with TiddlyWiki had the feel of a very young, excited writer, so I was very surprised to later discover his age. I didn't know about him for very long, but the character described in this post really shined through.
• Joe the office mate — Joe would get wildly excited by one "big idea" for weeks at a time. This could be a new idea of his own or a "well known" idea of somebody else's: the Rsync algorithm; public key cryptography; diff algorithms; parsing algorithms; etc. He would take an idea off the shelf, think (and talk!) about it very intensely for a while, and then put it back for a while and dive into the next topic that felt ripe.
• Why OO Sucks — Note that this is an older post.
• Erlang/OTP 21.3 — Welcome to Erlang/OTP, a complete development environment for concurrent programming.
• One secret to becoming a great software engineer: read code — Similarly, seeing diverse coding practices lets you expand your palette when it comes time to write your own code. Reading others’ code exposes you to new language functionality and different coding styles.
• djblue/tetris — An almost complete tetris in clojurescript
• Animated guide to building tetris with Clojurescript
• The Mad Botter INC on Twitter — Happy #EarthDay! We are awarding a free @system76 #DarterPro to the middle or high school student that can send our CEO @dominucco an innovative idea to@fight climate change using #Linux. To submit please write up a report and diagram & email it to [email protected]