The Problem With Null

This is from an email that was sent to me by the Australian Democrats. They are doing the right thing and seeing who on their list is interested in being maintained on a subscriber list. The problem is the NULL value in the 'Dear NULL' line.

One of the things I hate about Null is that it is a compiler level issue that has somehow propogated to databases and nearly always ends up at a customer level because it litters presentation logic. There is no way that the end user of this email should even/ever be faced with the word Null.

In my opinion it is a fundamental flaw in software engineering that this problem still persists. No wonder the inventor of null wished he had not.
Permalink, The Problem With Null, Apr 2009, cam
Kathryn: Hi Cam - firstly as the person who hit send on the email - sorry about that.

The problem was that on around 1200 records in the list of 36,000 someone had put NULL in to the name field. Had it been blank it would have said 'Friend'. I have fixed it all now... but if you'd like to email me from your email address so I can track you down in the system I'll put your name in so the next one says 'Dear Cam'. :D
cam: Hi Kathryn, I didnt mean to single out the Australian Democrats, it is a pet peeve of mine in software engineering how a low level issue like that is geared - by the structure of software tools and development methodologies - into presentation logic and a data state that is only meaningful to a software developer becomes one of perplexity for the end customer.

One system I worked on was endemic with NullPointerExceptions being blasted out to customers - stack trace and all. Usually front-end engineers have to clean up the mess that back end engineers make with their 'throw runtime exceptions' philosophy that gets around java's default state of checked exceptions. IMO software engineering has failed when these get to the customer.

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