Tony Hoare invented the null reference in 1965 while designing the ALGOL W language, simply because it seemed the easiest way to represent the absence of a value. He later called it his “billion dollar mistake” — a conservative estimate, given the decades of segfaults, NullPointerExceptions, and entire categories of security vulnerabilities it spawned across C, C++, Java, and virtually every language that followed. Modern languages like Rust and Swift have introduced optional types specifically to make null-related crashes impossible. Meanwhile, C soldiers on, still crashing proudly in embedded devices, operating system kernels, and wherever legacy code is quietly running the world.
