Fail Fast and Noisily, Fail Politely
We need to consider two key principles when coding for errors. First, we should fail as soon as an error occurs, and we should fail noisily. Several programming languages adopt the principle of failing silently, trying to fix up the error and continuing; this results in code that is a nightmare to debug. In Erlang, when an error is detected internally by the system or is detected by program logic, the correct approach is to crash immediately and generate a meaningful error message. We crash immediately so as not to make matters worse. The error message should be written to a permanent error log and be sufficiently detailed so that we can figure out what went wrong later.
Second, fail politely means that ...
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