“Simple” means the definition has been kept compact, which should suggest problems went unaddressed. Gabriel’s “Worse is Better” essay reminds us that making a

“Simple” means the definition has been kept compact, which should suggest problems went unaddressed. Gabriel’s “Worse is Better” essay reminds us that making a system do the Right Thing™ is rarely simpler. But making the runtime go out of its way to store the exact type of an object you don’t have is damn weird. In theory a method could accept a nil receiver, but in practice they never seem to.