Kotlin Avoided a $1,000,000,000 Mistake

[@DenaTollefson]

Hoare made a billion dollar mistake with his null reference and null pointer language design youch! That is quite a thing! It is nice Kotlin has null safety in place. Fantastic video explaining how to ameliorate and avoid null issues 😀

[@willtollefson]

Glad you liked it! More modern programming languages are moving toward these sorts of checks which I think is a very welcome addition.

[@martindolanek8197]

rust anyone?

[@willtollefson]

Rust is awesome! Its getting deeper into the linux kernel now and has been gaining momentum for a while now

[@TRK--xk7bb]

The only real null safety is not having null in the language in the first place, this is a bandage at best

[@willtollefson]

I assume you're thinking of a language like Tcl or maybe Rust - I could see that point and agree there are loopholes to still get NPEs. I think though in the grand scheme of things, kotlin's nullable types are a lot like Rust's Option, with the caveat that since kotlin is compatible with Java at the byte code level, its possible for Java to do something it shouldn't with kotlin data structures.