it's interesting to think of computer programs as very long mathematical operations because you'd think that'd imply that we could make them infallible (or at least easy to cover from a point of failure) but we rarely see that surfaced outside the context of like DX (IMHO - I'd love to read about cases where that isn't the case). I can think of a case where some long polling operation can be popped in and out of (like if you're contacting 30 services in serial fashion but want the user to see feedback as you go along but we kind of ignore how long it takes things to complete away and hide this behind a "loader").