[smt88]

> If you want a robust, working, large system, you have to account for unintended things happening some of the time

Ever written a large code base with isolated I/O, functional code, and typed/static analysis? Because I have, and nothing unintended happens except at the I/O level.

When something unintended does happen, it throws an exception: something genuinely exceptional has happened.

This code base has yet to throw an exception in production, and it also hasn't had a bug in production (after running for 6 months with ~1,000 active users).

[geofft]

I'm going to have to dispute your definition of "large system" if it's been running for a mere 6 months and you describe it as if it had a single author. Let me know once it's changed maintenance twice and also once it's changed management twice. Robustness is not about how well a system performs in its initial conditions; it's about how well it responds to change.

Also, from the sounds of it, it doesn't seem like a distributed system. Client-side JS is by its nature a distributed system, dealing with network partitions all the time because end-user internet connections are unreliable.