Re:Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers
by unscaled on Sunday September 04, 2016 @10:07PM
(#12427696)
Go's wholesale embrace of null is kinda jarring at this day and age, since it doesn't even have safe null dereferencing operators like Groovy, C#, Kotlin et. al. It's like Java all over again.
Considering Rob Pike is a huge fan of Tony Hoare, and the inevitable mountain of pain caused by null references, that's kinda surprising.
But I guess "Worse is Better" in the sense of "simplicity of implementation is valued over all else" is still the guiding principle of Go. As Tony Hoare himself said: "But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement". It seems like we're doomed to repeating this mistake again and again.
Considering Rob Pike is a huge fan of Tony Hoare, and the inevitable mountain of pain caused by null references, that's kinda surprising.
But I guess "Worse is Better" in the sense of "simplicity of implementation is valued over all else" is still the guiding principle of Go. As Tony Hoare himself said: "But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement". It seems like we're doomed to repeating this mistake again and again.