Why do so many "developers" not understand 'null'?
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I have just gone through four QA questions, each of which is an error caused by a null reference. And yet none of the posters seems to have any idea a) how to diagnose and fix it, or b) even what the error means. Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
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I have just gone through four QA questions, each of which is an error caused by a null reference. And yet none of the posters seems to have any idea a) how to diagnose and fix it, or b) even what the error means. Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
Perhaps because they are so spoiled that they have never in there life encountered "nothing" and have no empathy for the poor code where they would otherwise put in a null check or try/catch to help it succeed. Prolly not. But kids today. :-D
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I have just gone through four QA questions, each of which is an error caused by a null reference. And yet none of the posters seems to have any idea a) how to diagnose and fix it, or b) even what the error means. Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
Well, after all it is the Billion Dollar Mistake[^], as Tony Hoare himself put it :-D Recently I had to go through a large code base where the authors went crazy using Non-nullable pointers[^] almost everywhere. What can I say, seems a complicated problem for many people :rolleyes:
Mircea
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I have just gone through four QA questions, each of which is an error caused by a null reference. And yet none of the posters seems to have any idea a) how to diagnose and fix it, or b) even what the error means. Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
The song "Absolute beginners" by David Bowie springs to mind :-\
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I have just gone through four QA questions, each of which is an error caused by a null reference. And yet none of the posters seems to have any idea a) how to diagnose and fix it, or b) even what the error means. Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
Well, in a world where we have programming languages that have concepts like "truthy" and "falsey", what can you expect? :rolleyes:
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I have just gone through four QA questions, each of which is an error caused by a null reference. And yet none of the posters seems to have any idea a) how to diagnose and fix it, or b) even what the error means. Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
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I have just gone through four QA questions, each of which is an error caused by a null reference. And yet none of the posters seems to have any idea a) how to diagnose and fix it, or b) even what the error means. Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
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I read somewhere, years ago, that zero/nothing is one of the most difficult concepts for the human brain to understand. I think it was suggested that that was why there is no zero in Roman numerals.
It isn't. I have one apple in my hand. How much do you have in yours? Even prehistoric hunters came back with "zero". There's no 0 in Roman Numerals because it would not make sense to count nothing. A farmer that owes no taxes gets ignored, they counted what was owed. "Zero" would have no use there; even if that is the return of your hunting trip, 0 is not recorded. Writing is too precious to record zero's.
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: "If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I have just gone through four QA questions, each of which is an error caused by a null reference. And yet none of the posters seems to have any idea a) how to diagnose and fix it, or b) even what the error means. Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
Addresses of other addresses boggles the mind; until you get the hang of it.
"Before entering on an understanding, I have meditated for a long time, and have foreseen what might happen. It is not genius which reveals to me suddenly, secretly, what I have to say or to do in a circumstance unexpected by other people; it is reflection, it is meditation." - Napoleon I
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I have just gone through four QA questions, each of which is an error caused by a null reference. And yet none of the posters seems to have any idea a) how to diagnose and fix it, or b) even what the error means. Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
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Give freedom back to 'NULL' to exist. If not: Dear c# designers, please then remove the possibility to define nullable types ;P
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I have just gone through four QA questions, each of which is an error caused by a null reference. And yet none of the posters seems to have any idea a) how to diagnose and fix it, or b) even what the error means. Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
There is a bridge joining the two buildings in our location. Any "developer" whose code crashes in production because of a bad pointer gets hanged from the bridge pour encourager les autres. So no, this is not a common problem. :) Seriously, all the developers I work with (even the young 'uns) know what a null reference is, and know to avoid it
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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Well, in a world where we have programming languages that have concepts like "truthy" and "falsey", what can you expect? :rolleyes:
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There is a bridge joining the two buildings in our location. Any "developer" whose code crashes in production because of a bad pointer gets hanged from the bridge pour encourager les autres. So no, this is not a common problem. :) Seriously, all the developers I work with (even the young 'uns) know what a null reference is, and know to avoid it
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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Quote:
Seriously, all the developers I work with (even the young 'uns) know what a null reference is, and know to avoid it
Same here. All the young serious developers I'm working with, know how to handle it.
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It isn't. I have one apple in my hand. How much do you have in yours? Even prehistoric hunters came back with "zero". There's no 0 in Roman Numerals because it would not make sense to count nothing. A farmer that owes no taxes gets ignored, they counted what was owed. "Zero" would have no use there; even if that is the return of your hunting trip, 0 is not recorded. Writing is too precious to record zero's.
Bastard Programmer from Hell :suss: "If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
In Norwegian, the name of numeric zero is 'null'. So Norwegian kids 'sort of' have an excuse for confusing the two. But they are quite different. Zero is a distinct, well defined numeric value that you may treat 100% like any other numeric value. 'null' is nothing, not a numeric value, but a void. Emptiness. An abyss. Not at a valid numeric value. Some programming languages use the term 'void'; it is really much more descriptive. I feel like digging up my old Robert Heinlein collection to re-read the short story—And He Built a Crooked House[^]. The story tells about a crazy architect (in California, obviously :-)) who designs a house which is a 3-dimensional projection of a 4-dimensional cube, a tesseract. The night before the house owners move in, there is an earthquake that makes the house fold up as a true tesseract, in 4 dimensions, not just as a 3-dim projection. I believe that Heinlein has taken liberties in his description of how a real tesseract would appear. But his description of the view out one window, of a total emptiness, not even black, gave me shivers when I first read it, many years ago. It is a beautiful literary description of the concept of a 'null'. I think that I didn't fully understand the concept of null, void, myself until I read the Heinlein story.
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I have just gone through four QA questions, each of which is an error caused by a null reference. And yet none of the posters seems to have any idea a) how to diagnose and fix it, or b) even what the error means. Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
Richard MacCutchan wrote:
Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
Yes, all the time. I almost think it is something you have to learn the hard way, because in my experience, most are not aware of this as they code. Now, new IntelliSense with VS 2022 and ReSharper will point this out/alert you right away when it happens, but still, everyone should grok this concept.
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I have just gone through four QA questions, each of which is an error caused by a null reference. And yet none of the posters seems to have any idea a) how to diagnose and fix it, or b) even what the error means. Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
A guy on the team I just joined was somewhat miffed about the whole nullable feature in C#. He had learned in university that object oriented languages had nullable references. And C# is an object oriented language... so obviously we could not force references to have values.
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I have just gone through four QA questions, each of which is an error caused by a null reference. And yet none of the posters seems to have any idea a) how to diagnose and fix it, or b) even what the error means. Do those of you who still work in teams find this is a common problem with younger team members?
Richard, this is a problem of perception, you seem to think anyone who posts in Q&A is a "developer". Most are probably just learning (and you are their teaching resource) and a lot of them are code monkeys at best.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity - RAH I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP