Perhaps not mutually exclusive, all programmers try to introduce as few bugs as possible; but the philosophy is in fact "let it crash", then you reset to a stab

Perhaps not mutually exclusive, all programmers try to introduce as few bugs as possible; but the philosophy is in fact "let it crash", then you reset to a stable state. Not only is the programmer unburdened of the cognitive load of trying to imagine every single point of failure, but also of the workload of a lot of defensive programming. The whole reasoning behind this is what I said before: in large systems there will always be bugs, errors and failures will happen (some even outside of your code, e.g. power failure). Imagining every point of failure is impossible, so don't try to. Don't write preemptive code. Yes, Erlang is dynamically typed, but not weakly typed.