Software has a reputation for being tricky. It feels brittle when we're building it, and it fails incomprehensibly in use. We sadly shake our heads and say "We can never make it perfect". But there's a reason why software is like this: for as long as we've been creating it, programs have been stuffed with designed-in failure modes, every one placed there by a conscientious programmer, and every one amplified through larger and larger contexts until it becomes an irreversible collapse. This cascade of failures is what gives software its delinquent character.

But what if we could write software that doesn't have any failure modes? What if we could create software that remained stable, safely and reliably performing its tasks, no matter what adverse states it encountered?

It’s simple: if we want to write software that doesn’t go wrong (and we do, don't we?) we have to stop writing software that’s designed to go wrong. It turns out that failures in software really are optional, and you can choose not. The result is quicker and easier to write, much easier to maintain, and never, ever breaks.