Szorc: Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3

Posted Jan 20, 2020 18:30 UTC (Mon) by darwi (subscriber, #131202)
In reply to: Szorc: Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3 by HelloWorld
Parent article: Szorc: Mercurial's Journey to and Reflections on Python 3

> But the Scala version is much more informative. Every function now tells you in its type how it might fail (if at all), which is a huge boon to maintainability

Long time ago (~2013), I worked as a backend SW engineer. We transformed our code from Java (~50K lines) to Scala (~7K lines, same functionality).

After the transition was complete, not a single NullPointerException was seen anywhere in the system, thanks to the Option[T] generics and pattern matching on Some()/None. It really made a huge difference.

NULL is a mistake in computing that no modern language should imitate :-( After my Scala experience, I dread using any language that openly accepts NULLs (python3, when used in a large 20k+ code-base, included!).