4 ms·

>The inventor of the null reference refers to it as his "billion dollar mistake" because it "has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes,

>The inventor of the null reference refers to it as his "billion dollar mistake" because it "has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years." I've heard this Tony Hoare quote before, and it makes zero sense to me. If your reference is a number, your reference can be zero. How many billions of dollars have been saved by having a reserved constant which indicates "this is not a valid reference"? How would I know that a pointer was uninitialized if this wasn't a feature?

davidt84 2y ago
Zero is a perfectly valid memory address. The ability to have uninitialised pointers is also a terrible mistake.
mamcx 2y ago
The problem is that `null` is not `None`. `None` is, critically, a SINGLE value that is `None = None`. Null is whatever. That is the mistake.
- nxyt 2y ago
  Isn't undefined 'whatever'? Usually I see people indeed treating null as none value.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
It doesn't make zero sense to be, but I feel like it is strongly strongly strongly over-rated as a defect. Yes it probably has lost us a couple billion in productivity by now, but I struggle to think of times this has had impact at any of the orgs I've worked at. People love flipping out about js's weird implicit casting rules (the "wat") talk, but it too feels like one of these things that people will adoringly latch onto as a defect & use endlessly as some buge mortal flaw, even though it's an issue once or twice early in your codership when you didnt know what you were doign anyways then you are over it (and today, typescript & linters will shield you from harm here). I don't want to totally write this shit off, but the negative antagonistic fervor & dogmatism people will adopt when they find some leverage to confirm their negarive biases is truly staggering, and an issue of great great social harm in my mind. Better advocacy against these issues would be welcome, but man, the discourse & discussion of these "defects" feels so uncontrolled & Dark Side rooted, not real, decoupled from the situation I feel on the ground.

davidt84 2y ago

Zero is a perfectly valid memory address. The ability to have uninitialised pointers is also a terrible mistake.

mamcx 2y ago

The problem is that `null` is not `None`. `None` is, critically, a SINGLE value that is `None = None`. Null is whatever. That is the mistake.

nxyt 2y ago
Isn't undefined 'whatever'? Usually I see people indeed treating null as none value.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

It doesn't make zero sense to be, but I feel like it is strongly strongly strongly over-rated as a defect. Yes it probably has lost us a couple billion in productivity by now, but I struggle to think of times this has had impact at any of the orgs I've worked at. People love flipping out about js's weird implicit casting rules (the "wat") talk, but it too feels like one of these things that people will adoringly latch onto as a defect & use endlessly as some buge mortal flaw, even though it's an issue once or twice early in your codership when you didnt know what you were doign anyways then you are over it (and today, typescript & linters will shield you from harm here). I don't want to totally write this shit off, but the negative antagonistic fervor & dogmatism people will adopt when they find some leverage to confirm their negarive biases is truly staggering, and an issue of great great social harm in my mind. Better advocacy against these issues would be welcome, but man, the discourse & discussion of these "defects" feels so uncontrolled & Dark Side rooted, not real, decoupled from the situation I feel on the ground.