null references redux + Looney Tunes

[Jeremie Pelletier]

Yigal Chripun wrote:
> On 02/10/2009 16:16, Jeremie Pelletier wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> all I can say is: Thank God I'm an atheist.
> it seems you do not want to hear a different opinion despite the fact 
> that option types exist in FP for half a century already and provide the 
> correct semantics for nullable types.
> 
> with your logic we should remove seat-belts from cars since it makes for 
> less careful drivers.

I don't think you understood what I meant, seat-belts don't require you 
to buy a bigger car engine because they don't affect the performance of 
the car whatsoever. They're also not enforced, the car will run just as 
fine if you don't wear them.