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by fuzztester 1057 days ago
>It does not mean free of bugs

What if there is a bug in those well-specified semantics?

1 comments

Then the semantics are not well specified.
The point being made here is that you can be infinitely specific and still run into unexpected failures. If you're going to claim there is a way out of that you are either very young of just straight up lying.

We're talking about Erlang here which, to my knowledge, is the only mainstream-ish general-purpose programming language that was developed to solve an actual business problem. To be that guy that quotes a relatively well-known quip that maybe you've already heard, the unofficial tagline was: "Remember in the 90s when your phone company would call you up and say that you can't use your phone for a few hours for 'planned maintenance'? Of course you don't... and that's tanks to Erlang."

That was accomplished because you can just specify the happy path, deal with well-known exceptions (are they really "exceptional" at this point?), and otherwise just turn it off and on again, as we all do. And, not to start a flame war, but it's a dynamically typed language to boot!