3 ms·
When the null concept was introduced to me in the seventies, the only thing I could say was that it would be causing a lot of unnecessary confusion in the futur
by iefbr14 2y ago
When the null concept was introduced to me in the seventies, the only thing I could say was that it would be causing a lot of unnecessary confusion in the future.
If you have missing values in your datarecord then that datarecord belongs in an exception-queue.
And now some 45 years later people are still discussing it like we did then..
- acuozzo 2y ago> If you have missing values in your datarecord then that datarecord belongs in an exception-queue. This depends on the context, no? I doubt there exists someone with a contact list on their phone which has every single field for every single contact populated. There needs to be some way to codify that a field in a datarecord is unpopulated. Using the "zero value" for the type of the field (e.g., the empty string) is reasonable, but is this necessarily better than NULL? I reckon an argument can be made that this approach is just as likely to lead to bugs. I'm not necessarily in favor of NULL, for what it's worth, but I can't think of an adequate replacement which doesn't reduce to "NULL in sheep's clothing".
- thfuran 2y agoI did last week, before I added the first contact.
- jfb 2y agoSometimes you want UNKNOWN, sometimes you want MISSING.
- iefbr14 2y agoJust give the data item a status field, don't fix it by medling with a designated (non)value. And while you are at it you can add some valid-from and valid-to fields for the item. That's how you do it proper.
- DangitBobby 2y agoMissing values are not always an exception. There's a reason modern languages almost universally include an Option type which may contain a Null and allow you to pass it around as a first class value. Good data representations allow you to express missing values.