Upon returning from vacation, the chief abbot of the
Laughing Monkey Clan found his temple in a state of panic
and disarray. The financial system they had just modified
was throwing NullPointerExceptions for all new customers.
These users, disquieted in the extreme, were terminating
their accounts after barely a day.
With some difficulty the abbot traced the problem to a
method whose stated purpose was to return a List of the
user’s transactions. If there were no transactions it
returned null, rather than the empty list.
“Bring me the monk who wrote this method,” he told the
temple guards. “And also the monk whose code invokes it.”
The first monk, who was the elder of the two, declared that
the blame should be placed squarely at the feet of the
second. “My Javadoc was clear in the extreme. It is not my
fault that he did not check for nulls.” The second monk hung
his head in shame and said nothing.
The abbot clapped his hands and two tall jade urns were set
upon the floor, one before each monk. “Your punishments have
been written on slips of paper within. Each day you are to
remove the first slip your hand touches and obey its decree
to the letter, until your urn is empty.”
The younger monk was bade go first. His hand had not gone
halfway into the urn when the rustling of paper was heard.
Reading the slip, he bowed and left the room.
The elder monk reached deep into his own urn until his
fingers brushed the cold bottom. “There are no slips of
paper in this urn,” said the monk, the slightest smile
playing at the corner of his mouth.
“Neither are there fish, nor ten mountains,” said the abbot.
The elder monk then cried out in pain. The urn fell over and
shattered. A scorpion scuttled away across the tiles.
The abbot regarded the dying monk. “All nothings are not
equal.”
