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I mean, it doesn't take much for a class of errors that has existed for 55 years to cause a billion dollars in damage. Just in US labor costs, that's less than 5 hours per developer year. And I probably spend about 10 hours a year on average dealing with NPEs.

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Sure, but most people see $1,000,000,000 and think only of the incomprehensible abstract - they see huge; they don't see what the value means.

They certainly don't see the amortised cost across the decades long operation of a highly successful industry.

So it comes across as a far deeper cut than the stubbed toe that it actually is.

Convenient hand-wave to distract from the question of wether or not it has been a mistake at all: "look, reverse-extrapolated to the individual man-year it's such a small number! Who cares about the sign!"

That hour you spent chasing an NPE? Yeah, it happened. (really not that often though) The time saved by having a single, universally accepted way of implementing optionality, even it's inconveniently always on? That's invisible because we did not live through the alternative.

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