The Let It Crash Philosophy Outside Erlang

Post by jolux » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:34 PM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #9

whatsmyusername wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part about javascript failing is a lot of time it doesn't do it at the thing that is the problem. I've run into a lot of cases in node where I passed something not quite right to a crypt library but didn't find out until like 2 pages later. Usually for things that in python would throw an exception immediately.

That's not really a Javascript problem. That's a dynamically typed language problem. Unless you add some kind of assertion/test at the entry point to a library, the failure will always be postponed to the point of use (or silent if it's never used, until the day someone turns a feature on). If the same sort of issue works differently in Python, the Python library has asserts or other tests, or is using the value at a…

Post by hopia » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:53 PM UTC

aprao wrote: post #4

While 'Let It Crash' is a philosophy, it is greatly aided in Erlang by extremely lightweight threads that communicate with each other via mailboxes.

Post by klyrs » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 1:17 AM UTC

Jtsummers wrote: post #9

whatsmyusername wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst part about javascript failing is a lot of time it doesn't do it at the thing that is the problem. I've run into a lot of cases in node where I passed something not quite right to a crypt library but didn't find out until like 2 pages later. Usually for things that in python would throw an exception immediately.

That's not really a Javascript problem. That's a dynamically typed language problem. Unless you add some kind of assertion/test at the entry point to a library, the failure will always be postponed to the point of use (or silent if it's never used, until the day someone turns a feature on). If the same sort of issue works differently in Python, the Python library has asserts or other tests, or is using the value at a…

Post by tonyarkles » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 1:24 AM UTC

mumblemumble wrote: post #10

aprao wrote: post #4

While 'Let It Crash' is a philosophy, it is greatly aided in Erlang by extremely lightweight threads that communicate with each other via mailboxes.

It's helpful in other domains, too. For example, in ETL pipelines, I would greatly prefer to have an entire DAG go down quickly and noisily than to risk having it generate incorrect data. It's the difference between a crappy morning, and a crappy day or even a crappy week.

Post by perl4ever » Fri, Jan 31, 2020, 1:56 AM UTC

echlebek wrote: post #14

davidw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What he might be getting at, that others have certainly discussed, is that things like "crash only software!" are not winning marketing slogans when trying to sell a piece of technology to higher-ups in your company.

Yes, you tell those people the software is "self healing".