On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 8:13 AM, Justin Johansson <n...@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.