But toxic or not, null serves some purposes. Now, I hope we’re on the same page regarding null’s status as a problematic language feature. This Stack Overflow answer also has some valuable information. I won’t dwell too much on the whole “null is evil” thing, since a lot has been written about it already. In this post, we’re going to examine some of the common alternatives for returning null before making the argument that the best alternative is null itself.

And while I do believe that many of the presented alternatives have their merits, I also think we may have overlooked the best solution for the whole thing. Even its creator has expressed regret over the null reference, famously calling it his “billion-dollar mistake.”īashing poor old null tends to get old, so authors don’t do just that. I’d say it’s also very likely that you agree with the sentiment, i.e., that the null reference is a feature our programming languages would be better off without. “Null is evil.” If you’ve been a software developer for any reasonable length of time, I bet you’ve come across that statement several times.

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