Comment by adriand
2 days ago
> Whatever Leijen said, I'm pretty sure it wasn't that
What makes you so sure? This is Hoare's apology for creating the null reference:
> I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.
Given that null references cause crashes, why would it be unreasonable for a researcher at Microsoft to say they try and avoid them? Is this journalist really so far off?
> I really don't get why journalists so rarely do basic fact checking of their own articles
If you compare journalism to our other sources of information - such as comments on Hacker News and posts on social media - I think it holds up quite well, especially when the outlet is a reputable organization. It's quite fashionable for technology people to be highly critical of what they (pejoratively?) call "legacy media", but the alternatives that the technology industry have brought forward, like social media, are far, far worse in terms of accuracy, and also do very little of the kind of investigative reporting that is crucial for holding powerful officials to account.
Re-read what the article says.
> Null was first programmed 60 years ago by a British computer scientist named Tony Hoare ... Hoare probably wasn’t thinking about people with the 4,910th most common surname.
It mentions null as a mistake and then ties it to the word 'null' by referencing that a significant number of people have that last name. As though if it were called something like xkcd that has no pronunciation and is unlikely to be a last name, that would be better.
I think overall journalism is worse because its perceived as being authoritative. Social media post might be similar level of information, but Wikipedia won't cite it and the laymen realize to take it with a grain of salt. There's also better feedback as the comment section is front and center. Also some person with no knowledge, experience or curiosity in a subject is less likely to comment on it. While a journalist's job is to churn out a wide variety of pieces on topics they're likely unfamiliar with.
The issue is that the way it's presented in the article, a layman would interpret it to mean Microsoft don't use null values anywhere in any aspect of their software. Not as "we use them all the time pervasively but would like to do so a bit less", which is what was actually meant.
We'll have to disagree about the accuracy of legacy vs other forms of media. Many of the best investigations I've ever read have been by independents on Substack, for instance.