Nil is Unfriendly, with Joe Ferris

In this episode, Ben and Joe discuss why abusing nil is unfriendly to your fellow developers, and dive into some of the other ways of representing nothingness.

While watching, you'll learn how nil can be contagious, confuse a domain, and violate core principles of Ruby and object-oriented programming. You'll see how to use Null Objects and exceptions to improve conditional logic. We even dive into an implementation of [Maybe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monad_(functional_programming) in Ruby, borrowing a concept from Functional Programming to prevent accidentally method invocations on nil.

You can also follow along with the slides.