What is Nil Punning?
Nil punning is a feature of Lisp. It began when nil was both the empty list and the false value. Two meanings for the same thing led to the idea of punning. Lispers liked it. And now, Clojure carries the tradition forward. In Clojure, nil has different meanings in different contexts. Is it good? Is it bad? We explore it in this episode.
Eric Normand: What is nil punning? In this episode we're going to go over the benefits, some of the disadvantages of nil punning and dive into what this is all about — its origins and things like that.
My name is Eric Normand and I help people thrive with functional programming. The folks at Functional Design in Clojure recently, a couple days ago, put out an episode called, "What is nil punning?" Same as my episode.
It's a great episode, you should go listen to it. I wanted to throw in my two cents into this discussion. Think podcasts could be a lot more back and forth between different podcasts, just like blogs used to be back in the day. This is my addition, my response to their episode.
