Somebody should really put together a collection of best practices for—a sort of collection of advice for people with this sort of name.<p>They could call it Null pointers.
This often comes up, but I never understood why.<p>Is it a case of e.g.<p><pre><code> If "null" == null
</code></pre>
With implicit conversion?<p>What language does this? I think perl might allow it by accident if you don't use strict/warnings pragmas, but it seems weird. Is it a PHPism perhaps?
This can happen in random circumstances. A long time ago Amazon did not allow me to ship to my home address. By trial and error I found out that if I changed a specific o in my address to something else, it suddenly worked. There are no special reserved or offensive words in the address, I've never found out why this was. It had been fixed since.<p>Also I own a domain name with a catch all email address. If I sign up for websites, I often use the company name in the email adress to track leaks or spam. They sometimes don't allow this.
Programmers don't care about things like "the real person using this program". They just want to complete some crappy function, mark a task as "done", and go on to the next one. If it annoys or hurts regular people, no big deal.<p>This is like government policies that hurt a minority of people. The bureaucrats don't care if it hurts a few people. And the minority is small enough that nobody else cares. They can't threaten the status quo, so they will just keep on suffering, and now that's just "how things are".
Even the error message is a sign of bad error handling: Last name can't contain "Null".<p>Contain? Is this is really what the if-clause did test for?
I'm only being half-facetious, it's hackable. Use homoglyphs.
For example:
<a href="https://gist.github.com/StevenACoffman/a5f6f682d94e38ed804182dc2693ed4b" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/StevenACoffman/a5f6f682d94e38ed80418...</a>
Also recently:<p>When your last name is Null, nothing works (wsj.com)
272 points by impish9208 16 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 295 comments
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113997">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43113997</a>
This seems to come up pretty regularly; here's some random articles about it:<p><a href="https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/</a><p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-b...</a><p>I blame the popularity of languages that encourage "stringly-typed" code; which means this problem is unfortunately unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
I worked with a guy called 'Com' which is a reserved word in Active Directory. It causes chaos so apparently his AD name is always modified to be less offensive to the Microsoft gods.
Often repeated, but people still need to see it:<p>Falsehoods programmers believe about names<p><a href="https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/" rel="nofollow">https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...</a>