The discussion around that time was interesting (though distributed around the blogosphere); Ned Batchelder had recently argued the opposite (and updated the ar

The discussion around that time was interesting (though distributed around the blogosphere); Ned Batchelder had recently argued the opposite (and updated the argument specifically to take Joel's article into account)[0][1]. It was at about that same time that Damien Katz was becoming firmly convinced that Erlang and crash-only behaviour would be the way to go in designing CouchDB[2][3]. (Both Damien and Ned were at Iris/Lotus working on Notes and Domino, and I was a Domino dev at the time.) [0] http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200310/joel_on_exceptions.html http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200310/joel_on_exceptions.html [1] http://nedbatchelder.com/text/exceptions-vs-status.html http://nedbatchelder.com/text/exceptions-vs-status.html [2] http://damienkatz.net/2004/08/crash-only-software.html http://damienkatz.net/2004/08/crash-only-software.html [3] http://damienkatz.net/2004/09/crash-only-software-revisited.html http://damienkatz.net/2004/09/crash-only-software-revisited....