Empty string used to be like my own version of null pointer.
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2025
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Oh, you worked at Oracle by any chance?
Dark times…
Like -1 for an Int nil value.
Which language can nil an int?
Groovy will automatically convert integers into objects, as it sees fit. And one such case is when you assign null to an integer.
There's some more languages, which try to treat primitive types like objects, to make them more consistently usable. As I understand, nullability is a big part of the reason why it can't be solved with syntactic sugar, so presumably this would be possible in all those languages.
If I'm not mistaken, Ruby is another one of those languages.
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easy there satan
I took great pains last week to convert a big python project to make it typed. (shoutout to MonkeyType)
It's so much nicer to develop now...
Oh that's a neat library. Type annotations in python are really nice, and you don't have to add tooling like when you switch from JS to TS.
Yeah, I stopped developing in JS for good ~1.5 years ago. After using TS, it seems crazy to go back.
Ah, the SQLite approach!
Me: Puts a boolean into sqlite
Me: Asks for that boolean
SQLite: "Here's that int you asked for"
It is also the bash approach, isn't it?!
Also, Tcl (a cute little scripting language from the 90s, best known for giving the world the Tk UI toolkit; it was somewhat Lispy, only under the hood, worked like sh, where everything was a string).
more directly, sqlite was originally for tcl which is why they share the semantics.
also I'd argue that sqlite is a bigger contribution than tk, but I suppose in a more roundabout way
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God, I'm so over SQL.
It's great, but it is so old and shows it. Feels like 99% of my SQL queries are just cheese.
Works though, and quick.
SQL is the only bedrock in my entire career. Its the one thing that has stayed relevant.
SQL is great but when you start having issues processing what is actually going on, its fine to pull out what you need and throw another language on top (python, C#, etc...etc...). Getting it to work slow is one step in making it fast again.
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They finally added strict tables which avoids most (all?) of those shenanigans.
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I am strongly strongly statically typed pilled and I will not apologize.
100%. Though I can't imagine the meme is actually saying that things being stringly typed is a good thing.
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void*
We don't touch that unless we really know what we're doing.
God, that reminds me of the debate on XML that I had with a developer about fifteen years ago.
Both our companies were working for a client who needed to publish product catalogues in several languages twice a year.
They had implemented a sort of Content Management System which they used with a plugin to feed data into Quark Xpress files as well as their website, IIRC. Cross-media publishing, essentially, and they had their own little set of format instructions to make words appear in bold, different colors, etc.
Since my company was tasked with translating the text into various languages, I suggested they come up with a way to store their data as XML. The standard tools in the translation industry can be easily customized to work with that, and XML would be a good way to future-proof their software. After a lot of delaying, grumbling, and ho-hum, they agreed to implement this plan.
Lo and behold, when the first meeting on the new XML format came around they showed it to me for the first time and... everything was in CDATA sections. Entire paragraphs of text with proprietary formatting instructions. 😐
When I tried to explain, very politely, and very patiently, that this was not going to work, the lead dev started insulting me. I swear to God, I've never been this close to punching someone in the face at a business meeting. 🤬
Thankfully, the client understood the issue and we eventually got an XML-based data exchange going. It is probably still in use today.
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The NHL banned the use of 00 as a number in the 95-96 season because they claimed their databases couldn't handle it. They still are fools because this continues to be a banned number to this day.
(i am old) both my brother and i were number 00 in our younger hockey years. we were goalies, so we got first pick of numbers on all new teams we played on, heheheh.
lol I think this when I see “any”
some of you have never programmed in tcl and it shows
I opened a TCL script once. It’s use of uplevel scared me. I’ve never dared to return since.
For those who don’t know: uplevel is a command that goes up one level of the stack frame, and then executes code there. A function can therefore execute code in its callers stack frame.
tcl is pretty fun actually, it's like bash on steroids.
for a preview of the insanity: anything surrounded by "" is a string, with the variable expansion you'd expect. anything surrounded by {} is also a string, but with no expansion. the equivalent in bash is the backtick string. but you don't need to know that to write tcl. if you approach {} as "code blocks" like in other languages, it just works. reason being that tcl evals everything, constantly, attaching little tags to strings that tells the language how things are used, like "this string is an integer" or "this string is code and here is the result from last time it ran". it's madness and, weirdly, robust as hell. Xilinx writes all their tooling in tcl. SQLite started life as a tcl module, and it's still the only api that is not provided by a plugin.
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Me, trying to learn flat assembler: "What is even an object?"
Me, as a professional Haskeller: "What is even an object?"
Just use enums
Simply make everything an array of bytes
Haha! Reminds me when I arrived in a team whose API accepted JSON and all the booleans were "True" or "False" (meaningful case, obv.) That was fun.
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where my Ada bros not committing war crimes at?
[Laughs in computed TypeScript strings]
This certainly Tcl'd my funny bone.
at the end of the day everything's a []u8 if you want it to be
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