*Dynamically* Tolerating Failures

Luke Gorrie quotes early Erlang philosophy on the Lightweight Languages email list...

In programming large systems, many small programming errors _will_ be made - we view this as inevitable. Formal systems and exhaustive test procedures are currently not capable of ensuring fault free software for systems of the size and complexity of modern telecomms applications. Given that errors _will_ be made, we are interested in the problem of detecting and handling those errors in such a manner that the system as a whole exhibits satisfactory behaviour in the presence of errors.