Fail-fast is one of the philosophies I love in Erlang. By using gen_server and supervisor, it's easy to write fail-fast software that works.
In most software I see, exception handlers are a myriad of poor implementations of "log a message, clean up state, and try/fail again" rather than the actual handling of a specific exceptional state. Many of the most frustrating bugs I've seen are introduced when an exception handler fails to clean up state and tries again with some kind of insane context or a leaked handle.
In most software I see, exception handlers are a myriad of poor implementations of "log a message, clean up state, and try/fail again" rather than the actual handling of a specific exceptional state. Many of the most frustrating bugs I've seen are introduced when an exception handler fails to clean up state and tries again with some kind of insane context or a leaked handle.