<story><title>Golang: Know Your &apos;Nil&apos;</title><url>http://jeremymikkola.com/posts/2017_03_29_know_your_nil.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>beeforpork</author><text>&amp;gt; Tony Hoare apologized for inventing the null reference: I call it my billion-dollar mistake.&lt;p&gt;Have we learned nothing?  Many languages without NIL&amp;#x2F;Nil&amp;#x2F;nil&amp;#x2F;null&amp;#x2F;NULL existed already when Golang was born.&lt;p&gt;And this attempt to heal the damage hurts, too:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; “make the zero value useful” philosophy&lt;p&gt;This is like instead of programming by exception (Java), it&amp;#x27;s programming by ignorance (of errors).&lt;p&gt;I like a few things about Golang (handling of numeric literals, for example), but not this thing.</text></comment>
<story><title>Golang: Know Your &apos;Nil&apos;</title><url>http://jeremymikkola.com/posts/2017_03_29_know_your_nil.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rvcdbn</author><text>Article incorrectly claims that calling a method on a nil value results in an error. Only attempting to dereference the pointer does. It’s fine to call methods on nil and that’s part of the “make the zero value useful” philosophy.</text></comment>