Re:The Logical Disaster of Null
by jasode on Thursday May 10, 2018 @11:27AM
(#17039719)
>For these times, there are tagged unions.
Again, tagged unions do not solve the author's examples of Aristotle logic puzzles and inconsistencies around null/None/Nil/Nothing/etc.
He's not talking about "type safety" enforced by static compiler checks, or opt-in nulls as the default vs opt-out, etc. Therefore, compiler enforced explicit pattern matching code on tagged unions misses the point.
I suggest you click on the Stackoverflow q&a link in the author's essay to get a better idea of what the his philosophical conversation is about.
>In other cases, it is absolutely insane to simply add on the possibility of the NULL value to every data type in a language.
That's a totally valid position but the author isn't talking about that. He's questioning the _meaning_ of "null" in light of observing (in his view) non-intuitive behavior with math and boolean operators.
Your "tagged unions" doesn't address his philosophical conversation at all.
My point is that if the author removed "null" from a hypothetical language because it's "weird", the users of such a hypothetical language would recreate the "null" again. This has nothing to do with discriminated unions or Option<T>.
Again, tagged unions do not solve the author's examples of Aristotle logic puzzles and inconsistencies around null/None/Nil/Nothing/etc.
He's not talking about "type safety" enforced by static compiler checks, or opt-in nulls as the default vs opt-out, etc. Therefore, compiler enforced explicit pattern matching code on tagged unions misses the point.
I suggest you click on the Stackoverflow q&a link in the author's essay to get a better idea of what the his philosophical conversation is about.
>In other cases, it is absolutely insane to simply add on the possibility of the NULL value to every data type in a language.
That's a totally valid position but the author isn't talking about that. He's questioning the _meaning_ of "null" in light of observing (in his view) non-intuitive behavior with math and boolean operators.
Your "tagged unions" doesn't address his philosophical conversation at all.
My point is that if the author removed "null" from a hypothetical language because it's "weird", the users of such a hypothetical language would recreate the "null" again. This has nothing to do with discriminated unions or Option<T>.