alt Hacker NewsAviation is a good example if you want to have zero fatal mistakes. There is a way and there is a cost to do so.
The same way erlang is good example of how to run a highly available system with hot reload and observability and stuff. There is cost for that too.
Maybe not all of the projects need the same properties. I'm fine if some of the stuff is having scheduled or unscheduled maintenance. Some kind of government portal that I use once a year had my permission to be offline between 0300 and 0500 and then again after 1200.
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Not losing production data and not getting breached is also something we try to make zero mistakes at.
A better metaphor would perhaps be machining. You will not find a shop that has no CNC anywhere, but the machinists who can also use manual machines will always have an edge for certain things. Not that they're working manually much in their day to day, and not as all as a failsafe, but you can just tell who has that kind of background.
(And you can also tell whose mind is stuck in the old world, too.)
Maybe it's different in your neck of the woods, but all the government portals I use tend to have access to rather sensitive PII, and I would really prefer their ops teams be up to snuff as a result.
The OP didn't present an absolute. They said "Aviation is a perfect industry to learn from" and I 100% agree with them.
Aviation is an example of how there's no way to have zero mistakes, or even zero fatal mistakes.
> I'm fine if some of the stuff is having scheduled or unscheduled maintenance.
You might be, and your customers may not! And your competitor could be more than happy to offer a more reliable service.
I’m using Elixir for every (web) project now specifically because the cost is negligible. I can't think of a reason to use anything else and the agents are _really_ good at writing it, particularly given the excellent structural guardrails that are in place.
Being able to ensure all of the test run freakishly fast async is a huge win too.
The problem is that people go on Twitter and see the posts from "thought leaders" and "influencers" who say things like "reading the code is not needed". Those people are not working on systems that have paying customers who would cancel their subscription - or worse - if the software became too defective or unreliable.
You only need a handful of occasions of creating massive billing errors for your customer's customers before they will slag you to all their CTO friends and pull the plug. Imagine Stripe began double-charging every third transaction once a week, and couldn't fix it after two months of thrashing because no one there has any understanding of how anything works anymore. They are simply done at that point, all the value of their brand lost.