Computer systems fail. We have to deal with it, we can't ignore it. - Joe Armstrong

How to make a list? Collecting the data, that's the easy bit. Sorting it into categories is slightly more difficult. Shortening the list is the most difficult part. That a really difficult problem.

We are computer scientists, we are slaves who works for these big companies [Google, Facebook].

The spec does not tell me what to do. What do I program? [...] I thought this is crazy, we are building products with specifications and things, and the specifications doesn't say what's supposed to happen. Then when you get to this point in the code where you don't know what's going to happen, everybody knows how programs it. I thought that's crazy because I didn't know and I thought everybody could interpret that differently and they could make an ad-hoc decision. So I thought to myself, the only sensible thing to do is crash. We just crash this call because we don't know what to do.