"Crashing is loud" below is a phrase to combine with "remote error recovery" from the link above. Erlang/OTP wants application structure that is peculiar to it, and makes that structure feel ergonomic.
> If I ship a feature that has a type error on some code path ... How is "let it crash" helpful to my customer?
The crash can be confined to the feature instead of taking down the entire app or corrupting its state. With a well-designed supervision structure, you can also provide feedback that makes the error report easier to solve.
However, while a type error in some feature path is a place that makes type annotations make sense, type annotations can only capture a limited set of invariants. Stronger type systems encode more complex invariants, but have a cost. "Let it crash" means bringing a supervisor with simple behavior (usually restart) or human into the loop when you leave the happy path.
"Crashing is loud" below is a phrase to combine with "remote error recovery" from the link above. Erlang/OTP wants application structure that is peculiar to it, and makes that structure feel ergonomic.
> If I ship a feature that has a type error on some code path ... How is "let it crash" helpful to my customer?
The crash can be confined to the feature instead of taking down the entire app or corrupting its state. With a well-designed supervision structure, you can also provide feedback that makes the error report easier to solve.
However, while a type error in some feature path is a place that makes type annotations make sense, type annotations can only capture a limited set of invariants. Stronger type systems encode more complex invariants, but have a cost. "Let it crash" means bringing a supervisor with simple behavior (usually restart) or human into the loop when you leave the happy path.