Joe Armstrong's passing is tragic. I never him, but he also inspired my own thinking as a software engineer. Even though Erlang is a language from the 1980s, it still feels like something from the future. I have only ever appreciated Erlang from afar, but it seems to embody what programming languages should be for building complex software systems. I enjoyed his talks quite a lot; he always brimmed with passion and life which I hope to maintain at his age. He was never old mentally or in attitude, which was infectious.