I've been reading these but it's become apparent that the author lives in a universe parallel to mine. I remember reading that in most languages "A null dereference or out-of-bounds array access is treated the same way as a network connectivity problem or parsing error" and scratching my head, because while I know some languages are like that (Java) there are others were a null dereference and the failure to establish a network connection have radically different effects (C++). At another point discussing error handling he says "This leads us to a beautiful sweet spot. It does suffer from the performance problems I mentioned earlier, but does very well on all other dimensions." so the author's sweet spot is a spot with poor performance, which also put me off because his articles all talk about performance but never concretely (in terms of nanoseconds).

Anyway it's an interesting, if long, series but most of the interest for me has been in reading things from a very different perspective from the one I hear at work every day.