> high likely because I've never dealt with errors in that way, the _encounter error, crash, restart, continue_ workflow seems a bit awful to me
It is a different way to see things, but makes sense when you consider that Erlang comes from the world of distributed high-availability telecoms where "one machine" is the same as no machine (because when — not if — the machine crashes, the system is dead).
Applied to the development environment, that means of course erlang developers try to avoid errors, but its designers know it's not possible to have 0 errors so they've built support for independent error recovery into the system: when an error occurs, the whole agent may be corrupted (in an invalid state or whatever) so the erlang way is to throw it out and have an independent "auditor" (the supervisor) decide what should be done.
At scale, that's essentially what Netflix builds (and exercises with their Chaos Monkeys)
It is a different way to see things, but makes sense when you consider that Erlang comes from the world of distributed high-availability telecoms where "one machine" is the same as no machine (because when — not if — the machine crashes, the system is dead).
Applied to the development environment, that means of course erlang developers try to avoid errors, but its designers know it's not possible to have 0 errors so they've built support for independent error recovery into the system: when an error occurs, the whole agent may be corrupted (in an invalid state or whatever) so the erlang way is to throw it out and have an independent "auditor" (the supervisor) decide what should be done.
At scale, that's essentially what Netflix builds (and exercises with their Chaos Monkeys)