Ep 047: What Is "Nil Punning"?

Functional Design in Clojure

Each week, we answer a different question about Clojure and functional programming.

If you have a question you'd like us to discuss, tweet @clojuredesign, send an email to [email protected], or join the #clojuredesign-podcast channel on the Clojurians Slack.

This week, the question is: "What is 'nil punning'?" We gaze into the nil and find a surprising number of things to talk about.

Selected quotes:

• "The lowly, magnificent nil. Some people love it, some people hate it."
• "Null is the value you give your program if you want to see it die."
• "Nil is not null."
• "This function found nothing, and I passed that to the next function, and it found nothing in the nothing."
• "It's amazing how much nothing you can find in nothing."
• "You can pull data out without fear."
• "What does a nil Cat look like?"
• "A lot of arithmetic stuff is nil-intolerant."
• "No answer isn't going to start becoming an answer later."