Joe Armstrong's method of solving problems ●

Joe explaining his approach to solve problems while answering a completely different user question

The general method for solving all problems is:

• Find the most difficult outstanding problem
• Solve it

Repeat this until the only remaining problems are trivial - and you know you can solve them.

I’ve always liked Joe’s way of explaining things and hence feel his book is one of the best books introducing a programming language. It’s very much a peek into the mind of the creator rather than just boring language specification laid out on paper.

Later on in this post Joe also mentions where he thinks Erlang is good at, which is really important to note coming from creator himself

Erlang is useless for making GUIs, number crunching and watering flowers. Choose another technology for this.

Erlang is gaining traction nowadays as the language (or platform) of choice especially to build IoT edge gateways, web servers (thanks Phoenix) & general actor-based distributed systems. Now, the problem with any language coming to mainstream is that people tend to use it for all sort of things. During those times, we should remember what Joe says here.