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Software Engineering

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  • "The good old saying goes like "Crash early, crash often".", well... it depends. Try doing this in an air traffic control software. Commented Oct 2, 2016 at 19:21
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    @Giorgio It is much better – especially – for a faulty air traffic control system to crash and hand over to the backup system than to continue producing nonsensical output. Commented Oct 2, 2016 at 19:30
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    @Georgio Like returning "sensible" default data, i.e. isRunwayUsed() simply returning 0 for errors? ;-) Yes, it always depends. But it often just drives the system deeper and deeper into chaos - making it harder and harder to recover later. Commented Oct 2, 2016 at 19:37
  • The alternative to a crash is to let the system stop as soon as an anomaly is detected and ask for user intervention to repair or restart it. Crashing means the programmers made little effort to let the system recover properly. It is OK for the GUI of a web application. It is a recipe for disaster in mission-critical software. Commented Oct 3, 2016 at 9:08
  • @Elko: We seem to agree: it depends. Commented Oct 3, 2016 at 9:11