If anyone wants to write a Taoist poem, in pseudocode, about how NULL is like an inning of baseball yet to be played...now THAT would be cool.
:) Kristina > As a Lifetime Baseball fan (married over home plate back in 2000), career-long web-programmer (I remember when NYPHP was first getting started), and long time stalker of this list, I second Kristina's "Love It". > > As programmers, we spend a lot of time using metaphors to explain what we are doing in a way easily understood by others. I've even explained the ins-and-outs of MX records by using a "delivery to an upscale apartment building" metaphor. But the baseball metaphor and Tao reference are best I've seen in a while... both for their simplicity and universal (at least in North America) appeal. > > And to think that I overlooked the original posting. Thanks Kristina. > Thanks for making my Friday interesting. > > > Patrick J. Fee > Manager, Systems Engineering Services > BAE Systems Technology Solutions & Services > Cel: (240) 401-6820 > Fax: (301) 231-2635 > [email protected] > > > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:talk- [email protected]] On Behalf Of Kristina D. H. Anderson > Sent: Friday, September 04, 2009 12:08 PM > To: NYPHP Talk > Subject: Re: [nyphp-talk] Need help understanding NULL > > References to baseball AND the Tao in a PHP post about NULL! Love it!! > > Kristina > > PS Also a jQuery fan here. > > -----Original Message----- > On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 11:08 AM, <[email protected] wrote: > > [...] the way I think of it is, NULL simply means no value at all. 0 and > boolean false and '' are values, for sure; NULL is, um, null. As for concrete examples, in baseball there are those two-row tables -- one for the > away and one for the home team -- with columns for each of the nine innings. > Before the game begins, what are the values in each of those fields? > > Problems can arise in PHP because if you var_dump($foo) and it's > NULL, is that because it was never set, or because it was explicitly set to > NULL? Or is it because you are referring to global that's out of scope because you're inside a function? PHP doesn't care because it's NULL in either case. If you have an $object and accidently lapse into French and type $objet-doSomething(), your program will puke because $objet is > likewise NULL. (Assuming for the sake of the example that you haven't actually assigned an object to $objet) > > As for Javascript, the days of "I hate it" are behind us. You gotta > do it, like it or not, in this brave new web 2.0 world. Fortunately we have > an ample selection of quality frameworks to choose from, all of which, apparently, have peculiarities sufficiently irksome to some programmer, > whose Hubris and Impatience greatly exceed her or his Laziness, so > that she will write yet another one, and cast of characters grows larger. I'm a humble consumer, myself, and I'm liking JQuery. > > -- > David Mintz > http://davidmintz.org/ > > The subtle source is clear and bright > The tributary streams flow through the darkness > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > New York PHP User Group Community Talk Mailing List > http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk > > http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php > _______________________________________________ > New York PHP User Group Community Talk Mailing List > http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk > > http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php > > _______________________________________________ New York PHP User Group Community Talk Mailing List http://lists.nyphp.org/mailman/listinfo/talk http://www.nyphp.org/show_participation.php
