You might be interested in Erlang and Elixir, where systems are designed to "simply fail" and then recover rather than trying to catch every possible error cond

You might be interested in Erlang and Elixir, where systems are designed to "simply fail" and then recover rather than trying to catch every possible error condition. These languages are also built upon the idea of using lots* of lightweight processes, which also provides a really nice model (the actor model) for concurrency and parallelism. It's worth noting that the designer of the actor model claimed that it was informed by how physical systems operate, which is akin to your biology comparison. Erlang and Elixir take that actor model and make it operate in a highly reliable fashion. Here's a quick intro to Elixir (it takes about an hour), where you'll build a distributed app and have it automatically recover from a failure in a process: http://howistart.org/posts/elixir/1 http://howistart.org/posts/elixir/1 * I had 400,000 processes running on a modest VM without maxing out.