I get the need to try to put a human face on a technical issue, but, holy mackarel, batman! 'suffer', 'trillion dollar mistake' - cut the hyperbole. Take the

I get the need to try to put a human face on a technical issue, but, holy mackarel, batman! 'suffer', 'trillion dollar mistake' - cut the hyperbole. Take the debate about null in the typesystem: Yes, having some information at write/compile time about whether some function may return something in the vein of 'not found' or 'not set' is quite useful. However, `null` as a reference, even though that is exactly what is usually 'said' (the null reference was a billion dollar mistake!), is something different. Typetag based typing systems can have the null reference and nevertheless provide full write-time information about it: "This variable is of a type that isnt tagged 'definitely not null' and you are passing it as an argument in a position where you are required to have this tag'". It's language design; things are complicated. Pithy maxims such as 'suffer', 'terrible', 'biggest crime since MS-DOS', and astronomic dollar amounts aren't helping. Can we try to put an end to this hyperbole? This very article shows where it goes: We went from 'billion dollar' mistake to a 'trillion dollar mistake' in the span of 3 paragraphs. I'm not looking forward to reading a hackernews post about the Vigintillion Euro Mistake in the near future to describe some solution to a complicated aspect of programming that somebody disliked a little bit.