null references redux + Looney Tunes

[Jarrett Billingsley]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 8:13 AM, Justin Johansson <no at spam.com> 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

I always think it's funny when people are like "so, I had this idea,
lemme throw this out there. I know it sounds weird, but just bear with
me - what if there were _no null_? Did I just _blow your mind?_"

And the perspective of languages with better type systems, it's like.. and?

data Maybe T = Just T | Nothing

The whole null/nonnull debate is a complete nonissue in languages like
Haskell because _they actually treat it formally and correctly_. And
they've _been_ doing this for years. For all the Java-ites to be like
"OMG PARADIGM SHIFT" it's just funny.