Jotting #2: Nulls and NullPointerExceptions

Debugging NullPointerExceptions in Java can be a real pain since the stack trace provides you only with a line number and the error message null. Yep, just null. Very short and very helpful!

In some cases it’s obvious which object was null, but in others you have several objects, explicit or implicit, in the same statement, and now it is much less obvious. Even the line number is wrong since it refers to the line where the statement starts while the error occurs two lines later:

// an exaggerated code snippet:

Bar b = x.foo1( y.blah(), z.some(), ... )

         .foo2( ... )

         .foo3( w.crash() );

So what failed? Is it y or z that is null or is it the result of foo1 or foo2 or was it w? In these cases I wish that null were a proper object, a sub-class of all classes, that would throw an exception with the message like “foo1 invoked on null“.

Some languages do implement null as a special object of this kind: Eiffel, Ruby. It can’t be too hard to add this to Java. Till then, we’ll still need the debugger …