Imagine the amount of bandwidth and energy saved, if they didn’t do any of this bullshit.

They are essentially using someone else’s money to get themselves more money. Fuck these people!

It’s not possible for everyone to just tell if it’s supposed to be sarcasm. ADHD makes it hard. A bad day makes it hard. A tiring day makes it hard.

The downside of the misunderstanding isn’t just downvotes. It’s possibly a proliferation of misinformation and an impression that there are people who DO think that way.

Being not serious while saying something grim is not a globally understood culture either. It’s more common and acceptable in the Western world as a joke.

So… call it accessibility, but it’s just more approachable for everyone to just put an “/s”.

Many of these meanings seem to be captured in some modern solutions already:

• We plan to provide a value, but memory for this value hasn’t been allocated yet.
• The memory has been allocated, but we haven’t attempted to compute/retrieve the proper value yet
• We are in the process of computing/retrieving the value

Futures?

• There was a code-level problem computing/retrieving the value

Exception? Result monads? (Okay, yea, we try to avoid the m word, but bear with me there)

• We successfully got the value, and the value is “the abstract concept of nothingness”

An Option or Maybe monad?

• or the value is “please use the default”
• or the value is “please try again”

An enumeration of return types would seem to solve this problem. I can picture doing this in Rust.