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When Your Last Name Is Null, Nothing Works (www.wsj.com)
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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The word, used by computer scientists to mean ‘no value,’ has created long-running challenges

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[-] [email protected] 30 points 5 months ago

Who the hell writes if 'null'? If it's a thing, what language would interpret a string like that?

[-] [email protected] 18 points 5 months ago

Fucking JavaScript

[-] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago

No it doesn't?

> Boolean(null)
false
> Boolean('null')
true
> null == 'null'
false
[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Srsly?

[-] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

Javascript is fun. The video takes a few jabs at ruby and then gives a glimpse into the insanity that is Javascript.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

More of this please

[-] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

!![] + !![] == 2

[-] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

I'd bet it's less simple input sanitizing and more 2 mistakes made separately because they don't know any better.

  1. The input field converting everything to a string indiscriminately
  2. Because they did 1, converting everything back to the assumed type

If the front end Dev makes the first mistake, null would be sent in the body as "null". Then on the backend, somebody might even be binding the variables correctly, but before hand realizing they have to deal with the market and rather than just have a conversation undoes it in their own code.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

It's fine in PHP, so that catches most server backends.

Ruby as well, it even raises a warning about the string where a bool should be!

Python handles it just fine, as well.

Rust doesn't allow it, depending on the backend framework and server software this might give issues.

The same goes for C# .NET

So depending on how this is handled a C# or Rust backend might cause the name not to be stored, but then I'd expect nothing to be stored... :/

this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2025
99 points (100.0% liked)

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