• some guy (unregistered)

    Maybe there was a saving grace: at some point, there was a isNullOrNull() and someone thought: "great idea, we should also have the AND case".

    Maybe when they tried to reach their brains, it went not even 404 but Connection Reset, who knows.

  • (nodebb) in reply to some guy

    Maybe when they tried to reach their brains, it went not even 404 but Connection Reset, who knows.

    More likely ETIMEDOUT. Connection Reset (ECONNRESET) would indicate the connection reached the lump of nerve tissue(1), but was rejected with a TCP RST packet.

    (1) I hesitate to call it a brain, frankly.

  • RLB (unregistered)

    Oh, an LLM could certainly have made this mistake. Because this is a don't-care-don't-test level mistake, and LLMs are trained on the collective output of the 'web, which is 90% don't-care-don't-test.

  • JPJ (unregistered)

    isTrueAndFalseAndFileNotFound()

  • (nodebb)

    "Let's say I have a database that's been poorly normalized and maintained."

    They are all poorly normalized and maintained. Trust me.

  • (nodebb)

    The first function should probably be calledisEmpty, that's a better name for testing for null or all-whitespace. But I've heard empty strings called null strings before, so isNull isn't so bad.

  • (nodebb)
    isNullOrEmptyAfterTrimming()
    
  • (nodebb)

    And I, have become, ... comfortably null.

  • xtal256 (unregistered) in reply to RLB

    That's why I'm always surprised at how good (relatively) the quality of the code it generates is. I'd have expected the average of all code on the internet to be way lower.

  • xtal256 (unregistered)

    Ha ha, that Jennifer Null link has this gem: "I feel like I still have to do things the old-fashioned way – Jennifer Null"

    Not sure if that is an intentional joke on the part of the BBC, but I kinda doubt it is which is what makes it even funnier.

  • (nodebb) in reply to cellocgw

    Oh yes. Yes, you win The Interwebs for today.

  • (nodebb) in reply to cellocgw

    Oh yes. Yes, you win The Interwebs for today.

    Addendum 2026-05-05 22:49: Ugh ... no way to delete the duplicate ...

  • SG (unregistered)

    Logical bug aside, I've definitely seen that stupid "null" check before... we have something similar in our product, because something in the distant past was coercing literal nulls into the string "null". Thankfully we've never had problems with that being a valid value in the data... someone's login name, etc.

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