null references redux + Looney Tunes

[Jeremie Pelletier]

Justin Johansson wrote:
> For the interest of newsgroups readers, I dropped in at the Cafe the other day and
> the barista had this to say
> 
> http://cafe.elharo.com/programming/imagine-theres-no-null/
> 
> Disclaimer: YMMV
> 
> Cheers
> 
> -- Justin Johansson

Most of the bugs he expose are trivial to debug and mostly come from 
beginners.

 From the article:
"The distinction between primitive and object types is a relic of days 
when 40 MHz was considered a fast CPU"

I so disagree with that on so many levels. That's exactly what I believe 
is wrong with programmers today, they excuse their sloppy programming 
and lazy debugging with safe constructs which have way more overhead 
than is actually needed. It doesn't really make the program easier to 
code but the programmer less careful, leading to new kind of bugs.

Maybe for financial or medical domains its acceptable since speed is not 
an issue, but I expect my $3k computer to not slow down to a crawl 
because its software is written in a "safe" way and I like people with 
older computers to still be able to run my programs without waiting 5 
minutes between any two mouse clicks.