What is nothing? nil? null? undefined? A vast void of emptiness that fills your soul with dread? Oh sorry, that’s just my stomach.
We often think of nothing as… well, nothing. It’s when something doesn’t exist and therefore cannot be interacted with. So in our code, we try account for having nothing. No User? No problem.
&.?Ruby devs are probably all too familiar with seeing this error:
NoMethodError (undefined method `foo' for nil:NilClass)
Most of the time, it’s probably due to a typo, but every now and then we end up having to do something like:
defined?(bar) && bar.foo # returns nil if bar is nil
If you’re on Rails, or are using ActiveSupport, you can use present? or try():