alt Hacker NewsPerhaps someone can enlighten me on this. I never quite understood the sentiment of treating money-related tech as somehow more critical than others. The effects of large SaaS services failing and the bank failing can be quite similar - businesses interrupted, money lost, etc. but it’s typically not life and death, so the importance of reliability should be similar.
I can understand treating social network sites as less critical, of course.
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I mostly agree: for many businesses, a big SaaS outage and a payments outage can look similar in impact (lost revenue, interrupted operations). It’s not “life or death” most of the time.
The reason money-related systems often get singled out is the combination of irreversibility and auditability: a bad state transition can mean incorrect balances/settlement, messy reconciliation, regulatory reporting, and long-tail customer harm that persists after the outage is over.
That said, my point isn’t “finance is special therefore FP.” It’s “build resilience and correctness by design early”, explicit state machines/invariants, idempotency/reconciliation, and making invalid states hard to represent. Doing this from the beginning also improves the developer experience: safer refactors, clearer reviews, fewer ‘tribal knowledge’ bugs.
Losses with money are easiest to prove thus easiest to litigate. And then also potentially prosecute. Money is in the end most of time reconcilable at the end. So any mistakes can be proven.
In other areas like lost sales or failures of the system there is lot more arguments. On other hand if you are rich enough and can prove the other side is off by sufficiently large amount of money you can bring the hammer down with facts.
Compare discussions about banking with discussions about evoting ! One is totally fine for software to handle, the other is absolutely not!! That tells you which one people really consider critical.