Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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This is the most boring argument in computer science. It's like arguing about whether a language should have "goto" or not. There is no new ground to tread here. Most mainstream languages have null references. An entire cinematic universe of languages have been built from the premise that you should not have null references. This is a fundamental rift in programming language theory, and the very best you can do on HN, at least on stories where that rift is not the main point of the article, is to restate it poorly.

Seriously, Tony Hoare dropped the mic on these arguments back in 1965. You have to move forward in these discussions on the premise that everybody already gets this very basic, very old PLT argument.

Just like if you had somehow managed to find a way to do a spaces versus tabs complaint in a story about (I don't know) Typescript, you will reliably generate sprawling threads by bringing this stuff up on any thread about a language with null references. It's easy for everybody to have an opinion here! Everybody knows the issue! Not everybody agrees! But you aren't doing any good for the thread itself; you're just jamming it.

I think you’re arguing against a point that GP didn’t make. Optionality and empty/uninitialized references can both be encoded in a type system, or one, or the other.

I didn’t interpret GP as arguing for or against null or otherwise rehashing what you correctly identify as one of the oldest intractable arguments in programming. The sibling comments not so much.

Yes, my point was not related to null. For all I care you can have `&T` and `Option<&T>` in your language, but allow `&T` to be null. In Rust, that would be `Option<*const T>`. Is that useful? I don't know. But it still separates the two orthogonal concepts. Go conflates them, rolling them into one, permanently removing useful expressivity.

> It's like arguing about whether a language should have "goto" or not

We all agreed they shouldn't, right? I'm not familiar with any language designed in the last 15 (20?) years that has a goto statement.

So, yes, I agree this is a very old argument and it's sad that Golang repeated the failures of its predecessors.

At least it doesn't include "goto", though the temptation to do it for the wordplay must have been intense.

Edit: Amusingly, it appears that PHP added goto in version 5.3 (August 2014) https://www.php.net/manual/en/control-structures.goto.php

> We all agreed they shouldn't, right?

We didnt't agree to that, only thet thr over usage of goto hurts readability, but it is perfectly fine where appropriate (as a JMP analog to non-assembly[0]). Any language that supports loop naming implements a subset of goto, and proves why it's sometimes necessary.

0. Why isn't JMP considered harmful?

No, nobody agrees about these things, which is why this is the most boring argument in computer science. You can't even get people to agree on typing. Not "which type system", any of it.

If you think your current position on these debates --- nullability, gotos, typing --- is the obviously correct position, you simply haven't talked to enough people. The answer to all these questions --- the real answer --- is "it's more complicated than you think".

> At least it doesn't include "goto", though the temptation to do it for the wordplay must have been intense.

https://go.dev/ref/spec#Goto_statements

> Seriously, Tony Hoare dropped the mic on these arguments back in 1965. You have to move forward in these discussions on the premise that everybody already gets this very basic, very old PLT argument.

cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12427069

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