The Power of Zero: What is NULL anyway?
I remember when I was first learning to code, I thought 0 and NULL were the same thing. They both mean "nothing," right?
But then I got my first NullPointerException (or a segmentation fault), and I realized that in computing, there is a massive difference between "the number zero" and "no value at all."
Let's look at why 0 is powerful, but NULL is dangerous.