2 ms·
Go's wholesale embrace of null is kinda jarring at this day and age, since it doesn't even have safe null dereferencing operators like Groovy, C#, Kotlin et. al
by unscaled 10y ago
Go's wholesale embrace of null is kinda jarring at this day and age, since it doesn't even have safe null dereferencing operators like Groovy, C#, Kotlin et. al. It's like Java all over again.
Considering Rob Pike is a huge fan of Tony Hoare, and the inevitable mountain of pain caused by null references, that's kinda surprising.
But I guess "Worse is Better" in the sense of "simplicity of implementation is valued over all else" is still the guiding principle of Go. As Tony Hoare himself said: "But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement". It seems like we're doomed to repeating this mistake again and again.