> Errors are often simply swallowed.

That's a choice, but it's not idiomatic.

You're expected to write things like...

    ok = thing_that_might_not_work().

(Well, that's what it looks like in Erlang anyway). If there's an error, it doesn't match, so it crashes. You don't have to check for success, but it's easy to, and 'let it crash' is the mantra, so yeah. Then you watch for crashes, and fix them with hot loading, and pretty soon you have a reliable system.

Let it crash ends up not quite working, so you end up catching a lot of errors, but you should be logging them, not swallowing them...