
The Golden Rule of Programming - spo81rty
http://www.stackify.com/golden-rule-programming/
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jconnop
Welp. That's an interesting golden error.

Cached version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vyvuBLO...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vyvuBLO-
YSwJ:www.stackify.com/golden-rule-programming/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

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pbosko
"If database connection can be null, it will be null."

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damncabbage
_"If it can be null, it will be null"_

So explicitly define what is allowed to ever be "null":
[http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/null-pointers-vs-none-
vs-m...](http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/null-pointers-vs-none-vs-maybe/)

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bunderbunder
Would that we could all just up and switch programming languages at the drop
of a hat like that.

Explicitly defining what is ever allowed to be 'null' is a great habit that
serves me extremely well during evenings and weekends. But it's completely
useless to me, by virtue of being impossible, between 9am and 5pm.

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ciupicri
Is _Error establishing a database connection_ the golden rule of programming?
:-)

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gnuvince
That's some Jedi Master type of rule right there.

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sqba
a better programmer I already am

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adamtulinius
"if it can be null, it will be null"

And here comes a repetition of Maybe Foo in haskell, and Option in Scala/Java.
Hehe :-)

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3amOpsGuy
I'm not a C# coder but I understood it was possible to have non-nullable
types?

Keep meaning to try C# for a project sometime. I understand it to be a more
expressive, programmer friendly Java.

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bunderbunder
Value types are non-nullable. But they're also stack-allocated* and passed by
value, so they're really only appropriate in certain cases. You can't use them
as general-purpose non-nullable objects.

*In practice, though technically that bit's an implementation detail of Microsoft's run-time and not part of the language spec.

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PuercoPop
Isn't it just an specific formulation of Murphy's Law? If something can go
wrong it will. And that is not just the golden rule of programming, it's the
golden rule of Life!

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spo81rty
Sorry, MySQL crashed :-(

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shuma
never knew that the golden rule was a database error.

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GiraffeNecktie
For me, it's more of a "general rule" than a "golden rule".

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MJR
This is deep. I believe the golden rule is to keep your database online.

