February 2026

The Zen of Erlang

post

ferd.ca · February 2016

  • Explains how OTP supervision trees encode recovery strategies as explicit architectural decisions, not afterthought error handling
  • Distinguishes between errors (expected, handle inline) and failures (unexpected, let the process crash and restart clean)
  • “Let it crash” requires pre-planned supervision hierarchies — the crash is intentional, not accidental