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Is Error establishing a database connection the golden rule of programming? :-)
That's some Jedi Master type of rule right there.
a better programmer I already am
It is the exception that proves the rule!
Sorry, MySQL and word press couldn't take the traffic I guess :-(
never knew that the golden rule was a database error.
For me, it's more of a "general rule" than a "golden rule".
(comment deleted)
This is deep. I believe the golden rule is to keep your database online.
"if it can be null, it will be null"

And here comes a repetition of Maybe Foo in haskell, and Option in Scala/Java. Hehe :-)

"If it can be null, it will be null"

So explicitly define what is allowed to ever be "null": http://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/null-pointers-vs-none-vs-m...

Would that we could all just up and switch programming languages at the drop of a hat like that.

Explicitly defining what is ever allowed to be 'null' is a great habit that serves me extremely well during evenings and weekends. But it's completely useless to me, by virtue of being impossible, between 9am and 5pm.

I'm not a C# coder but I understood it was possible to have non-nullable types?

Keep meaning to try C# for a project sometime. I understand it to be a more expressive, programmer friendly Java.

Value types are non-nullable. But they're also stack-allocated* and passed by value, so they're really only appropriate in certain cases. You can't use them as general-purpose non-nullable objects.

*In practice, though technically that bit's an implementation detail of Microsoft's run-time and not part of the language spec.

For some data types. Strings and objects can always be nullable.
Isn't it just an specific formulation of Murphy's Law? If something can go wrong it will. And that is not just the golden rule of programming, it's the golden rule of Life!