[article] Language Design Deal Breakers

[bearophile]

Jonathan M Davis:

> and I think that null can be extremely useful.

""null"" values are extremely useful, no one disagrees on this.
Good functional languages use even more ""null"" values compared 
to most (or all) D programs!

------------------------

Walter:

> It was Hoare's engaging presentation on it that turned it into 
> a cause celebre.
>
> Null pointers aren't even remotely the source of most 
> programming bugs. If they were, then languages that disallow 
> them would be super-productive in comparison. But they aren't. 
> They're just an incremental step, and elevating it into a "deal 
> breaker" is frankly ridiculous.

Even if it's not a big problem, in the end this problem is now 
"solved", because all new languages (Scala, Rust, all the 
Java-like languages appearing on the JavaVM), plus most or all 
functional languages, don't have pointers nullable on default.

Bye,
bearophile