A Short Ballad Dedicated to the Growth of Programs
Written by Eric Normand. Published: December 11, 2011

From OO to Clojure Workshop!
Watch my free workshop to help you learn Clojure faster and shift your paradigm to functional.
Reference: A Short Ballad Dedicated to the Growth of Programs
This is a cautionary tale set in a dystopian Lisp where nil
is not
false and false is not nil
.
So I went back to the master and appealed once again
I said, pardon me, but now I'm really insane
He said, no you're not really going out of your head
Instead of justVAL
, you must useNOT NULL
instead
nil
means (traditionally) false, the empty list, and also "no value".
In my opinion, Lisp has hit a sweet spot. Somehow, nil
overloading
makes for succinct programs.
It's possible to go overboard and do this wrong. Case in point: the problems with boolean values and comparison in Javascript.