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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.
Thursday, 30th June 2022