Ok, guys. I will be straight… I am here escaping a bug.
By definition, a bug is a harmful microorganism that… But shouldn’t this be a computer science blog?
Yes, we have a lot of microorganisms: colons, semi-colons, small letters, capital letters, you name it. These aren’t the only ones of course, there are a ton of others that you get to know once you have invited them to your code. Apparently, the one bug that has brought me here has no name. It has things to do with null (nothing really) and pointers… argh! I’m sick of being sleep deprived.
In addition to cancelling plans and saving money, I had hoped this weekend would be a productive one. I had a list of things to do: write an essay, write code to get a user’s location (sneak peek) and watch lots of Grownish. I’m not fully guilty of not fulfilling the list, but I’m incapable of defending myself based on the if-I-can’t-measure-it-it-doesn’t-exist principle. I have done so much and so little at the same time.
Any amateur that does JavaScript programming will tell you that this Null pointer exception is the worst error you’d ever experience. It is frustrating because you’ll never know what it is. Neither does anybody on GitHub or Stack Overflow understand you properly. Or is it just me? Damn, I feel like crying at this point. Because of this error, I have gone back to social media—I have created accounts on Instagram, Twitter, reddit, and Facebook to seek help. To text android programmers and see if they could help me. Yes, it was—and still is—a full panic attack.
Not far from where I write this, I have asked my friend to keep looking at all those accounts I have created to see if we’ll have an answer. I don’t know if we’ll go anywhere. What I hate the most is the fact that I have followed each step of the book I was reading and still didn’t come up with anything substantial. I hate my code.
There are a few things—courtesy of @codememes on twitter—I accept about programming now. Any of which I would have refuted before I began:
1. Things not working every now and then is more frustrating than not working at all.
2. Give a man a full working program, you frustrate him for a full day. Teach a man how to program and you frustrate him for a lifetime.
3. GitHub is seriously Nerdstagram!
4. Taking credit for fixing a bug I introduced is another kind of high.
5. The best book a programmer can ever read is “How to Design and Implement Plans that work and other hilarious jokes you can tell yourself.”
Don’t take it from me that Null pointer exceptions are terribly bad. I mean, even its founder–Tony Hoare, inventor of ALGOL W–says, “I call it my billion-dollar mistake…At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object-oriented language. My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.”
Seriously, how “good” should an error be for its inventor to recognize its flaws like that?
The problem is, null is just that. It is null, nothing. And as we have seen with evolution and creation stories, people struggle to understand that something can come out of nothing. I am one of those people. So as much as I haven’t understood how an attempt to invoke method blah blah blah on a null object reference became a null pointer exception, I won’t even try to explain.
Seriously though, anybody who knows how to fix this bug, please hit me up at brandonpeter129@gmail.com. All help is appreciated, and very much needed!
Codify 