Comment by typesanitizer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by typesanitizer | Hacker News Reader

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Hi, author here. I'm a big fan of Armstrong's work, I've watched several of his talks multiple times and always get something new out of them even if I don't agree entirely. :)

I do mention Erlang near the start of the post, around the 360 word mark:

> Joe Armstrong’s talk The Do’s and Don’ts of Error Handling: Armstrong covers the key requirements for handling and recovering from errors in distributed systems, based on his PhD thesis from 2003 (PDF) [sidenote 3].

> [sidenote 3] By this point in time, Armstrong was about 52 years old, and had 10+ years of experience working on Erlang at Ericsson.

> Out of the above, Armstrong’s thesis is probably the most holistic, but it’s grounding in Erlang means that it also does not take into account one of the most widespread forms of static analysis we have today – type systems

When I was reading your article my first thought was most people would only read the intro but many don’t even do that before commenting.

Given how prevalent just reading the headline -> immediately posting a preconceived take is, most information is probably communicated through the top comments these days.

It's a great article but calling Erlang's philosophy of 'Let it crash' a pithy, catchy statement that brushes over the complexities of the real world was an unwarranted attack. There's much more to it and with Elixir on top it goes a long way in lightening the cognitive load of error handling and building fault tolerant software.

They aren't perfect tools but they are also not merely misguided academic exercised combined with vapid catch phrases, as the analysis seems to imply.

I have removed the mention of "Let it crash" from that section, and added a clarification for my original intent. I did not mean it as criticism of Erlang or Joe Armstrong, although I 100% understand how it could've been interpreted as such.

Thanks for the critical feedback.

Hey, thanks for listening.

You seem to put a lot of import on typing, any thoughts on the Elixir effort to introduce that to the language?

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