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borromakotlast Sunday at 3:03 PM1 replyview on HN

If I sounded snarky that wasn't my intention. At the end of the day though it doesn't feel like you read the article which was clearly in a different context than the one in which you responded. FWIW I didn't expect this small article speaking to a small audience (Elixir devs) to make the rounds on hacker news.

I agree on the importance of defining terms, and I think the important thing here is that "process" in Joe's parlance is not an OS level process, it is one of a fleet of processes running inside the BEAM VM. And the "system" in this case is the supervisory system around it, which itself consists of individual processes.

I'm critiquing a common misunderstanding of the phrase "Let it crash", whereby effectively no local error handling is performed. This leads to worse user experiences and worse outcomes in general. I understand that you're offering critique, but it again sounds like you're critiquing a reductive element (the headline itself).


Replies

tmcblast Sunday at 3:30 PM

I did read the article. I concede that I might not have understood it. Again, I never said it is wrong, but rather that it has a blind spot. I am familiar with Joe Armstrong’s work because I worked on a proprietary (and rather worse tbf) native distributed systems middleware in the past.