A Whole Lot Of Nothing

RE: A Whole Lot Of Nothing

Siew Moi Khor — Tue, 30 Sep 2003 23:05:00 GMT

Another very interesting post Eric. Thanks!

RE: A Whole Lot Of Nothing

Blake — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:03:00 GMT

Heh. Anyone who interviewed with me from '98-'01 faced exactly that question: What is the difference between Empty, Null, Nothing and "", and when would you use each. Sadly, I would say no more than 1 in 5 or 10 got it right.

RE: A Whole Lot Of Nothing

Eric Lippert — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 00:47:00 GMT

I am always interested in what questions people ask in interviews. What information was this question intended to elicit?

RE: A Whole Lot Of Nothing

Blake — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 08:46:00 GMT

I believe in working at the right level of abstraction, and through that period VBScript and ASP were clearly the right level of abstraction for the sort of work my team was doing. I also believe that better developers need to understand how things work at at least one level lower. A good answer to that question involved an understand of at least Null propagation and the fact that Nothing is an object reference not a value. Better answers understood Empty's association with uninitialized variables. I don't remember if I ever got one who knew Empty compared as equal to "" or 0. A superior answer involved showing they understood at least something of the lower level of abstraction, i.e. if they mentioned the VARIANT struct or VT_EMPTY and VT_NULL.

RE: A Whole Lot Of Nothing

Peter Torr — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 09:56:00 GMT

Another odditity is a "missing value", which is actually a VT_ERROR with a value of DISP_E_PARAMNOTFOUND. Since JScript classic cannot represent 'Nothing' or a missing parameter, I had to write some very trivial code to expose these two concepts as properties of an ActiveX object (JArgUtil)

RE: A Whole Lot Of Nothing

Eric Lippert — Wed, 01 Oct 2003 20:17:00 GMT

I agree strongly that devs need to understand at least one level lower, and two is better. What I find interesting is that your question tests _knowledge_. I don't give a darn about what the candidate _knows about_. I care very much about what they _know how to do_. I try to elicit information about _skills_ when I interview people, not _knowledge_. But then again, I am looking for people who will be very flexible problem solvers over a very long term. If you're looking for people who can jump right in and solve a specific problem in a specific language, then it makes more sense to look for specific knowledge.

RE: A Whole Lot Of Nothing

Blake — Thu, 02 Oct 2003 03:52:00 GMT

We're on exactly the same page. A big chunk of the interviews in that era were for contract positions, where I was not particularly interested in the long term and very interested in how fast they could be productive.

JScript Equality Operators, plus More On Mad Crushes

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Null Is Not Empty

Fabulous Adventures In Coding — Thu, 14 May 2009 18:06:12 GMT

Back when I started this blog in 2003, one of the first topics I posted on was the difference between

Null – не то же самое, что Empty

Блог Эрика Липперта (перевод) — Mon, 25 May 2009 01:22:14 GMT

Когда я начал этот блог в 2003 году, один из первых постингов был про отличия между Null, Empty и Nothing