Joe Armstrong: a minimalist hacker   
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A couple of weeks ago we got the sad news of Joe Armstrong [0] passing
away. You would find a moving blog post by Francesco Cesarini at [1]. I
know many would think "Joe who?", but Joe was indeed one of those
figures you would remember forever, if you are lucky to stumble into
them. 

Joe was a true hacker from another era. One of the creators of the
Erlang programming language and of the OTP platform [2], many of his
ideas and lots of his work on concurrency and robustness have impacted
most of the modern programming languages, and are ultimately what most
of "The Internet" of today, big or small, relies upon. Yet, he would
laugh out loudly every time a student asked to make a picture with him,
and any newcomer at the Erlang User Conference would have had a very
hard time trying to spot this "star" at all, until Joe would have made
it to the stage to give one of his mesmerizing talks. 

Joe was a true minimalist, who believed that computing must strive to
remain simple [3]. He could not understand over-complications and/or
early (evil) optimisation. He would pursue the most beautiful solution
to a given problem, yet the most effective and least redundant one. He
would not suffer breaking things that worked, except for showing how
they could be improved by employing a more elegant, less bloated, more
consistent and overall simpler solution. It shouldn't come as a surprise
that he never hid his disgust for java, C++, javascript, and similar
bloat monsters.

I am glad I had the opportunity to talk to him several times. I still
remember when, after I finished my talk on a hack to introduce hard
real-time tasks in Erlang (it was 2007 or 2008), he laughed at me saying
"gosh, we never thought of abusing the scheduler that hard!". A typical
joke from Joe: witty, simple, and with many ramifications.

I now feel quite silly for having thought "Oh, here comes the usual Joe"
at several Erlang events. In my mind he would have always been part of
Erlang and its community. I guess some people are so special that you
really end up thinking that the laws of physics should not apply to
them... 
 
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[0] gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Joe%20Armstrong%20%28programmer%29
[1] https://www.erlang-solutions.com/blog/remembering-joe-a-quarter-of-a-century-of-inspiration-and-friendship.html
[2] gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Erlang%20%28programming%20language%29
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20190425125125/https://joearms.github.io/#2014-06-25%20Minimal%20Viable%20Programs