nil

Well that’s awkward. What do we do now? We can’t just carry on and pretend we have a value – that never ends well. Do we swap it out for a default value? Do we write a special program just for handling nil? Do we crash? Or do we rewrite everything from scratch in Haskell?

What can we learn about Ruby by thinking about a world where nil can never exist? And what can we learn about Haskell by thinking about a world where it can? And what can we learn about ourselves by recognising that both of these worlds are the world we live in.

John is a Lead Engineer at Form3, a payment technology company. When not coding in Go for a living John can probably be found learning Haskell, reading about mathematics, or having a nice sit down and thinking about what kind of thing programming is.