Null once again

InfoQ has a nice talk by Tony Hoare, Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake. I've been in a few arguments in that past that languages would be much better without null, so it's nice to hear someone much smarter than myself, who also happens to have invented the null reference regret their existence. But he doesn't feel as bad as he thinks the C language designers should feel, because he says, they allowed the for the buffer overflow by abusing the get routine. And that allowed for viruses, which have cost industry much more than his billion dollar mistake. He's tough on the language designers (and himself): "Language designers should be responsible for the mistakes programmers make". Thanks Tony, for giving me someone to blame when I muck things up :)