alt Hacker NewsNo need for the snarky comment. If I am wrong, that is fine.
Of course Joe Armstrong could explain what I meant, but in a much better way: https://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2003-March/007... (edit: see the "Why was error handling designed like this?" part for reference)
My personal interpretation is that systems must be able to handle crashing processes gracefully. There is no benefit in letting processes crash just for the sake of it.
Actually, now I thought about it, I know exactly what irked me about the approach. I hope the author takes it as constructive feedback:
Saying "let it crash is a tagline that actually means something else because the BEAM is supposed to be used in this particular way" sounds slightly "cargo-cultish", to the point where we have to challenge the meaning of the actual word to make sense of it.
Joe Armstrong's e-mail, on the other hand, says (and I paraphrase): "the BEAM was designed from the ground up to help developers avoid the creation of ad-hoc protocols for process communication, and the OTP takes that into consideration already. Make sure your system, not your process, is resilient, and literally let processes crash." Boom. There is no gotcha there. Also, there is the added benefit that developers for other platforms now understand that the rationale is justified by the way BEAM/OTP were designed and may not be applicable to their own platforms.