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Comment by the-dude

6 years ago

I once had a product owner for a student/university web app who complained that for a particular user, their lastname was displayed as 'None'.

This was a Python project and the product owner apparently already had learned 'None' equals NULL.

I dug into the file which we used to import the users from and discovered the user's lastname actually was 'None'.

Maybe it could be added to the list of falsehoods programmers believe about names: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...

  • I think this example falls under falsehood 31, where None would be considered a "bad word" that can't appear in names.

    • That describes making some "bad" values illegal, where I believe the problem here was that they didn't expect the value.

There was a manager i worked with whose last name was "Null". She complained that every few months her account would get wiped from the HR system.