title: Erlang's let-it-crash philosophy - applicable elsewhere?
body: <p>Erlang's (or Joe Armstrong's?) advice <em><strong>NOT to use defensive programming</strong></em> and to let processes crash (rather than pollute your code with needless guards trying to keep track of the wreckage) makes so much sense to me now that I wonder why I wasted so much effort on error handling over the years!</p>
  
  <p>What I wonder is - is this approach only applicable to platforms like Erlang? Erlang has a VM with simple native support for process supervision trees and restarting processes is <em>really</em> fast. Should I spend my development efforts (when not in the Erlang world) on recreating supervision trees rather than bogging myself down with top-level exception handlers, error codes, null results etc etc etc.</p>
  
  <p>Do you think this change of approach would work well in (say) the .NET or Java space?</p>