People ITT hating on null coalescing operators need to touch grass. Null coalescing and null conditional (string?.Trim()) are immensely useful and quite readable. One only has to be remotely conscious of edge cases where they can impair readability, which is true of every syntax feature
Languages with null in them at all anymore just irk me. It’s 2023. Why are we still giving ourselves footguns.
Because languages need to be able to handle the very common edge cases where data sources don’t return complete data.
Adding null coalescing to a null-safe language (like dart) is so much easier to read and infer the risk of handling null than older languages that just panic the moment null is introduced unexpectedly.
For old languages, null coalescing is a great thing for readability. But in general null is a bad concept, and I don’t see a reason why new languages should use it. That, of course, doesn’t change the fact that we need to deal with the nulls we already have.
How are we supposed to deal with null values though? It’s an important concept that we can’t eliminate without losing information and context about our data.
0 and “” (empty string/char) are very often not equivalent to null in my use cases and mean different things than it when I encounter them.
You could use special arbitrary values to indicate invalid data, but at that point you’re just doing null with extra steps right?
I’m really lost as to how the concept isn’t neccessary.
One alternative are monadic types like result or maybe, that can contain either a value or an error/no value.
I’ll point to how many functional languages handle it. You create a type
Maybe a, whereacan be whatever type you wish. The maybe type can either beJust xorNothing, wherexis a value of typea(usually the result). You can’t access thexvalue throughMaybe: if you want to get the value inside theMaybe, you’ll have to handle both a case where we have a value(Just x) and don’t(Nothing). Alternatively, you could just pass this value through, “assuming” you have a value throughout, and return the result in anotherMaybe, where you’ll either return the result through aJustor aNothing. These are just some ways we can useMaybetypes to completely replace nulls. The biggest benefit is that it forces you to handle the case whereMaybeisNothing: with null, it’s easy to forget. Even in languages like Zig, theMaybetype is present, just hiding under a different guise.If this explanation didn’t really make sense, that’s fine, perhaps the Rust Book can explain it better. If you’re willing to get your hands dirty with a little bit of Rust, I find this guide to also be quite nice.
TLDR: The
Maybemonad is a much better alternative to nulls.
