[tombert]

Something I learned awhile ago is that most people that I consider "celebrities" really aren't that famous, and as such are generally pretty happy to respond to emails.

In ~2014 I sent an email to Joe Armstrong (one of the creators of Erlang) asking some questions about concurrency because I still didn't fully understand why Erlang was supposed to be better for it. I expected him to just point me to an FAQ or simply not respond [1], but instead he wrote a very long, detailed explanation about the rationale of Erlang's design. It was well-written and it made a lot of things "click" in my brain.

That simple act by Joe was extremely instrumental in my career, I think for the better. I became very interested in Erlang, but also just concurrency theory and distributed systems, and I would like to think I almost understand it now :)

He and I would exchange emails occasionally over the next few years and he seemed genuinely enthusiastic about programming, Erlang, and people using it, and despite me barely knowing the guy, I was genuinely pretty sad when he passed away in 2019.

I think about that a lot; if I hadn't sent a dumb cold email my entire life would likely be very different.

[1] Which, to be clear, would have been perfectly fine!

[icepush]

A long time ago my mother sent a short hate mail to Mark Cuban after seeing him in a TV interview. He actually responded. Then he signed her up for the Mark Cuban newsletter. She could not figure out how to unsubscribe from it. It was honestly pretty hilarious.

[walrus01]

Sometimes I wonder how much of Russ Hannemann from HBO's "Silcon Valley" was based on real life anecdotes of people who interacted with Cuban.

RADIO ON THE INTERNET!!!

[jibal]

I've sent cold emails to Noam Chomsky and Daniel Dennett and received prompt and friendly replies. (I had met each briefly and mentioned that in my emails ... that may have helped.) I emailed Chomsky on 9/11, asking about blowback from U.S. operations in Afghanistan. He responded the next day, apologizing for the delay (!) because he was receiving so many queries. He sent me numerous citations, including a Newsweek (IIRC) article that was very much on point, as well as his own thoughts. I remember that he wrote "there are dark days ahead".

I also recall having an email exchange with Guy Steele about Java. Of course these days you can interact with all sorts of people publicly on social media -- I've had exchanges with Andrew Kelley and Walter Bright here on HN. Back in the day the "social media" was usenet -- and I had exchanges with various prominent people, including Marvin Minsky who sent me a draft of his book "The Emotion Machine" for review.

In 1978 I was working for a client of Interactive Systems Corporation (the first commercial UNIX developer) and a friend who worked at ISC said there was an opening but they couldn't initiate interest because it would be poaching from their client, so he suggested I send a letter. I sent a glowing letter about their being an innovative company in many ways (I meant every word) -- they were impressed and arranged an interview and I got the job.

[Shocka1]

This is really cool thank you for sharing.

[KPGv2]

> Something I learned awhile ago is that most people that I consider "celebrities" really aren't that famous

Yes. I've experienced this in many fields, from reaching out to the founder of a magazine, to several big name fans (artists and writers) in fandom, to touring hip hop artists (!!!), to people steering a programming language.

The first time, you can't believe they responded. But if you pursue excellence in that same field, eventually you realize y'all are peers, and then you get someone freaking out that you responded.

[hack1312]

Erlang is so freaking cool, I’ve been itching for a project to use it (or Elixir, especially because I’m a huge Ruby fan) with ever since I learned about it/OTP when digging into the internals of Chef (server) and RabbitMQ, followed up by the book “Learn You Some Erlang For Great Good!” (an adaption of /book inspired by another wonderful book I read called “Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!”).

Non-sequitur but I used to bike past a “Haskell Street” on the way to/from a previous job and it always made me smile.

[agos]

I'm here to make your itch worse! we're using Elixir to build a fintech SaaS and it's by far the most dependable, boring, lovable part of our stack. We built critical parts with it (syncing data with external services, for one) and were just able to basically forget about it for years because it just... ran?

Erlang/Elixir are definitely not the best for everything, but if there's a good match it's unbeatable

[rozap]

Sometimes I think about how much of a pain it would be for our company to not use elixir. We would be spending so much time on mundane ops stuff and not building the thing. Such a lovely programming model and ecosystem.

[noisy_boy]

I remember reading about Elixir (or was it Erlang) and tried to follow a tutorial and trying to solve some simple exercises. I don't remember the details but I do remember writing the simple functions and they just stacked and fit like Lego bricks. I kept thinking that I will get stuck but I didn't and just kept going. Didn't have to engage in any flow-control or if/else etc. It was nothing like I had seen before. Unfortunately my curiosity pivoted to something else and I didn't complete it but I hope to swing back to Elixir someday soon.

[woliveirajr]

In 2013 there was some question about the SuperCow Powers that some programs had. I took time to ask Jason Gunthorpe about it. He didn't answer my email: we make a post about it [1] that became the canonical explanation. That had a huge impact on me: how could I take so long to answer simple questions from friends when Jason Gunthorpe took time to answer mine?

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20190322061230/https://plus.goog...

[abrookewood]

Yeah, genuinely sad when he passed. He's not the most influential person in computing, but for some reason, he was the one person I most wanted to meet. Probably the way he presented himself. Seemed like a genuinely good guy.

[ButlerianJihad]

The people who are celebrities, or public figures, or likely to receive a lot of email, also have secretaries, or PR/social media managers who open all their messages and respond to strangers.

This is why it can be so easy to find someone's contact email address, versus phoning their office and trying to get past the voicemail or front desk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction

[embedding-shape]

Also, lots of them seemingly read emails themselves, or at least have their secretaries forward emails written by passionate people to them, as I've also gotten replies to a bunch of emails from people I didn't expect such involved reply to, even when they're "celebrities".

[ButlerianJihad]

QED

[danieldc]

Will it b possible to share the problem and the insight he provided?

[392]

You should ask him if we can read the email please :-)

[Snacklive]

Do you have the email by any chance ? That sounds like an awesome read