Hacker News Reader

Comment by hood_syntax | Hacker News Reader

Valid points about the ambiguity in that example, but I do believe 'none' is easier to parse than 'null' for the average person. I'm assuming that none is meant to represent, like null "no input was given" not "an input of zero/an empty list was given".

View on HN

But in that case, wouldn't “unknown“ be even better? I'm not a native english speaker, though, so I may miss some fine nuances in the meaning of “none“.

Disclaimer: this is just my personal views, so I may be missing something here.

'unknown' is almost like saying "We don't know what should be here", while 'none' is closer to saying "We didn't get passed any information here".

Ultimately, I feel like 'unknown' is more specific, it conveys intent beyond that of 'none'. Such as, it could imply we actually don't know what kind of data 'Opinions' should hold, rather than that there merely happens to be no data to put there.

We can throw out options for a long time, as there is no perfect choice. Ren went with `none` as it is standard Rebol and Rebol's designer thought about it long and hard.

As a native English speaker, I agree that "unknown" is better than "none".

I would hope that a native English speaker knows the difference between

Cookies in the jar: none

and

Cookies in the jar: unknown

Unknown is a nice word for this, yes. And while we don't focus exclusively on being terse in the Redbol world, "unknown" is a lot more work to type than "none", harder to scan visually as well.

also "Some | None" is a common functional programming idiom.

It's worth mentioning that Python refers to null as None.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com