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?
Besides my full time job as a developer I also teach Computer Science one night a week at a community college. My observation is that the focus for young developers/students is HOW to do things rather than WHY things need to be done. Having mentored many developers over the last 40+ years I always focus on the WHY, because once they understand the WHY the HOW not only becomes fairly obvious they find they often have multiple HOWs to choose from. This is not unique to Computer Science, my 3 daughters are all teachers, High School English, High School Biology, and Elementary school. There is hope, perhaps slight and teacher dependent. The Elementary school teacher pioneered Common Core math in her school district and discovered kids she had taught math to that way in 1st and 2nd grade had significantly better performance in 4th grade. Of course, not universally, but sufficient to clearly see a difference.