NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)
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NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)
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Re: NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)
#2Why can't people just get over it and stop blaming the language for their own sloppy code?
Re: NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)
#3Why can't people just get over it and stop blaming the language for their own sloppy code?
Because everybody is working on the limit of complexity they can comprehend, so there is no headspace left for dealing with bad ergonomics. We need all the help we can get.
Re: NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)
#4"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike"
When did computer science become about hand holding? has it always been this way? Look at react. It was designed to force functional programming concepts in an OOP manner. Is the future of programming the implementation of tightly controlled interfaces with extreme type safety? I would argue thats where we are going. Things are becoming less expressive, not more.
Re: NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)
#5Nulls in strongly typed languages can get rather weird but from a C/C++ perspective it is the same as 0. nullptr is just a correctly casted 0.
Re: NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)
#6"The key point here is our programmers are Googlers, they’re not researchers. They’re typically, fairly young, fresh out of school, probably learned Java, maybe learned C or C++, probably learned Python. They’re not capable of understanding a brilliant language but we want to use them to build good software. So, the language that we give them has to be easy for them to understand and easy to adopt. – Rob Pike" When d…
It's the Java approach. Don't give people footguns and force them to write software in a readable, testable, maintainable style. It works extremely well in software engineering, because you want systems that work reliably and that can be maintained/extended by any other engineer at your org. In the professional software engineering world, "clever" programmers are almost always a horrible drag on their team.
Re: NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)
#7At least C# has the syntactic sugar to easily check for null references which lets you avoid the horrors of code like `(if s != null && s.length)`. Instead you can type `s?.length`. Never have I appreciated syntactic sugar as much.
Re: NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)
#8Other candidates:
- null terminated strings
- machine dependent integer widths
Re: NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)
#9I wonder whether the author also hates the 0 and 1 elements of natural numbers. Since they have the same flaw of having weird, special semantics that all other other numbers don't share. In fact 0 is not even a number, but a placeholder for the concept of the absence of a number. Just like NULL.
Re: NULL: The worst mistake of computer science? (2015)
#10> it means that C-strings cannot be used for ASCII or extended ASCII. Instead, they can only be used for the unusual ASCIIZ.
This is a very pedantic quibble, and I'm not even sure it's correct. ASCII has NUL as well, and ASCIIZ isn't a character set AFAIK.
> C++ NULL boost::optional, from Boost.Optional
First of all, nullptr, second, std::optional.
> Objective C nil, Nil, NULL, NSNull Maybe, from SVMaybe
Nil is not a thing in Objective-C, to my knowledge.
> Swift Optional
You're looking for nil. So it should be four stars?
> Swift’s UnsafePointer must be used with unsafeUnwrap or !
You're confusing Optional and UnsafePointer.