On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 9:41 PM, Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2012 at 5:15 PM, clay <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> - Option's main advantage is not avoiding NPE's, but factoring common
>> null-related conditional logic out of all your code and into a standard
>> library component.
>
>
> Exactly. I expanded on this point here.
I don't know, any expansion where you have a dig at Tony Hoare seems
likely to be off. :)
> On a related note, I find it funny when people advocate Option because "it
> forces you to deal with null pointers instead of ignoring them" and then
> rant against checked exceptions because they force you to do exactly the
> same thing. I was also a bit surprised that the whole discussion on Optional
> in the podcast never mentioned a single time the main benefit of Options
> (composability) while casually discussing practices that are sure to lead to
> pain (calling get() or pattern matching on the content of an option), and by
> extension, discourage people from using Option altogether.
You seem to be deliberately clouding the issue. The side of the fence
that likes Option and friends like it not because "it forces you to
deal with null pointers," but because it lets you move the issue into
the realm of types. Which is pretty much explicitly why they dislike
exceptions, because exceptions are pretty much an escape hatch from
the normal view of the type system. (Either that, or I am completely
off in my admittedly naive understanding of the issues.)
What is wrong with pattern matching on the content of an option? I
confess I did that just earlier today. I had a reference to an Object
that might have been null. So, I thought the following was fine:
val myRef = something that returns Object for some reason and might be null.
Option(myRef) match {
case Some(x:ClassICanDealWith) => something with x
case Some(x:OtherClassICanDealWith => something else with x
case _ => either I was null or something I didn't know how to deal with
}
Was I wrong in that?
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