On the 8th of February 2018, during Quality Meetup #15, I gave a presentation titled “Fixing a billion dollar mistake”. Tony Hoare introduced Null Reference w in ALGOL language in 1965. He calls this decision a “billion dollar mistake”. It was so easy to implement and probably it caused a loss of millions of dollars due to the mistakes done in the software over the 40 years. During the time, people came up with different ideas of solving that problem with software libraries, good programming practices, static code analysis and compile time code analysis. Moreover, we have new programming languages with null safety features. During the presentation I’ve shown how to deal with the null reference problem in the JVM projects no matter if it’s a greenfield solution or legacy code.
Slides from the presentation are available below.
See a few pictures and archived meeting info at: qualityexcites.pl/quality-meetup/meetup-15
Thanks everyone for coming!