Technology Musings

January 23, 2009

Amusing / Historically Bad Ideas in Programming

JB

The QCon developer's conference this year has an interesting track - historically bad programming ideas.  However, I have to say that I'm actually a big fan of the null pointer, despite the issues that it gives some people.  The fact is, without null, nil, undefined, or 0 (depending on language), the actual task of programming would be much more difficulty.  And, I would argue, would cost more than the bug-savings that we would get from having non-null type systems.  In order to get around them you would have to write code that is more confusing and more time-consuming, and you might even wind up with the same set of bugs, just moved around slightly.