Reading a lot of the responses here makes me think that there is a misunderstanding of what the author is saying. He is talking about infrastructure code, not

Reading a lot of the responses here makes me think that there is a misunderstanding of what the author is saying. He is talking about infrastructure code, not application code. In application code, the goal is to reduce risk to your app by shedding scope so that the app only does what it needs to do to be successful. Where does that scope get shed to? It gets shed to infrastructure. Infrastructure code only exists to reduce risk to applications. To be successful, it has to accept risk and handle it. This requires a different way of thinking, and a different way of coding. If an app doesn't handle an exceptional condition ok, there's someone there running it - they can just run it again. Or there's infrastructure that will run it again. In something like zeromq, that is not a use case.