I think it was because - in the words of The Dude, "Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."

> I'd take a NullPointerException over a memory (edit: space) leak any day of the week.

That's your preference and I can understand that preference from your point of view because in order to debug a space leak in a Haskell program you would first have to learn Haskell.

I'm not the one who downvoted, but I also didn't think it contributed much =(

Sorry, it's not an opinion, it's a fact ;-)

Why? NPEs are easily solved, even for beginners. Stack trace says blah blah blah occurred at line X in class Y. Easy fix, totally low hanging fruit for beginners and experts alike.

The space leak issue, OTH, may be easily avoided (if one is well versed in Haskell best practices), but resolving them when they occur is something else entirely. Seriously, you have to break out a memory profiler in order to find out where the issue _may be_, not exactly where it is on line X of class Y.

So, yes, I never get them (in Scala), but I'll stand by taking an NPE over a space leak any day of the week.

thirsteh summed up my feelings in his response to your comment but I'd also like to add that a preference is an opinion and not a fact. You may prefer apples over oranges. It is not a fact that apples are better than oranges.

For instance, what if your null pointer in language x causes a silent fail? Now your apples are beginning to look like oranges.

This is really quite silly since the choice between NullPointerExceptions and space leaks is a false one. You can have both in either language.