Firstly, I’ve never said people shouldn’t have NULL. I said columns should default to be nullable.

Secondly, I’d already given outer joins as an example of why SQL needs to support NULL.

I would be nice that people like yourself bothered to read the comments your reacting to instead of jumping off the deep end (-4 on my original post now and people like yourself are literally just reiterating the same points I’ve been making. It’s insane)

If five people misunderstood your comment (which says nothing about outer joins as I reread it) maybe it is your writing that would need to be clearer.

Maybe but my experience on HN is that there’s sometimes a mentality of “fools never differ” on here. I’ve seen countless correct and/or experienced commenters get downvoted even when the comment is well written.

It’s also worth remembering that five people is still only a very small subset of the hundreds that would have read the comment and did understand/agree but didn’t bother to comment for fear of the wrath of those who have already expressed disagreement. For example I was actually voted up several times before the others commented (as well as a few times since).

So it’s really not worth blaming individuals for the comments of others. The only possible outcome from that is starting another, much stupider, argument.