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Discussion on: Unhealthy Code: Null Checks Everywhere!

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Carl-Erik Kopseng

It is not necessarily about nulls, but what to do in the absence of a value. You can often find multiple types of these null classes to cover different cases. And it does mean you have to rearchitect anything. For instance, when designing a Card component in a React application, that was dealt a User object, we assumed it would always exist. Suddenly, it was potentially optional, but that would imply changing user: User to user: User | undefined through multiple levels. Simply creating a NullUser that was returned at the top level selector function allowed us to make 0 (zero) changes further down.