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If you like Erlang, I recommend reading Making Reliable Distributed Systems in the Presence of Software Errors by Joe Armstrong: https://erlang.org/download/armstrong_thesis_2003.pdf

His PhD thesis explains the thinking behind Erlang, especially how it handles failures, message passing, and concurrency. It was last updated in 2003, 22 years ago, time really flies!

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Thank you for this, I'm unlikely to ever touch Erlang but looks like a fascinating read nonetheless.

It is a fantastic read. I find myself quoting section 5.3.1 on Well-Behaved Functions (WBFs) quite often, especially rule 2: "If the specification doesn’t say what to do raise an exception."

This really helps systems from muddling along into bizarre states, where things are going awry and nobody knows why.

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