That's a bit of a misrepresentation. Error handling on the BEAM has a few more layers than in other environments; specifically, the supervision tree can be used to "let things fail". That's not the layer where you should log or handle failures - that's a safety net that ensures your whole system won't go down if your error handling in a single process doesn't work.
For error handling, there are roughly these layers:
- functions can return {:ok, value} or {:error, error}
- functions can raise errors (similar to exceptions) that can be caught
- processes can be monitored from the outside, you get notified when they die
- processes can be linked and exits can be trapped, also notifying you on failure
- supervisors can handle process deaths in a configurable manner
- higher-level behaviours often expose their own error handling callbacks
That's a choice, but it's not idiomatic.
You're expected to write things like...
ok = thing_that_might_not_work().
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...