If your SQL model has nulls, and you don't have some clear way to conserve them throughout the data chain, including to the json schema in your API contract, you have a bug. That way to preserve them doesn't have to be keeping nulls distinct from missing values in the json schema, but it's certainly the most straightforward way.

The world has more than three languages, and the way Java and Python do things is not universally correct. I'm not up to date on either of them, but I'm also guessing that they both have multiple libraries for (de) serialization and for API contract validation, so I am not really convinced your claims are universal even within those languages.

I am not the other person you were talking to, I've only made one comment on this, so not really "hellbent", friend.

Yes, I am pretty sure I read the comments, although you're making me wonder if I'm missing one. What specific comment, what "case specified above" are you referring to? As far as I can see, you are the one trying to say that if a distinction between null and a non-existent attribute is not specified, it should universally be assumed to be meaningless and fine to drop null values. I don't see any context that changes that. If you can point it out, specifically, I'll be glad to reassess.

Oh, they can read, they know exactly what they are doing. The Republic has had enemies within from the start, and now they control the most powerful branch of government.

But who, who is "you" in this scenario? Who do you think can just tell the court "no"? Let's be specific.

Thanks for sharing this, it's quite interesting. I found a Wikipedia article on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unary_numeral_system

Apparently, as you did suggest, "base 1" is a name that is used, but is somewhat a misnomer.

The article mentions that Church encoding is a kind of unary notation, which I would not have thought of, but I guess it is.

Enjoyable little rabbit-hole to zap my productivity for the day.

You seem to have missed the important phrase "in source code", as well as the entire second part of my comment discussing that runtime functions that parse user input are different.

At the (SQL) database level, if you are using null in any sane way, it means "this value exists but is unknown". Conflating that with "this value does not exist" is very dangerous. JavaScript, the closest thing there is to a reference implementation for json serialization, drops attributes set to undefined, but preserves null. You seem to be insisting that null only means "explicit omission", but that isn't the case. Null means a variety of subtly different things in different contexts. It's perfectly fine to explicitly define null and missing as equivalent in any given protocol, but assuming it is not.

Closer to tally marks without clustering

Who calls it that? Who even uses that enough to have given it a name? Seems completely pointless...

It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure C treats a leading zero as octal in source code. PHP and Node definitely do. Yes, it's a bad convention. It's much worse if that's being done by a runtime function that parses user input, though. I'm pretty sure I've seen that somewhere in the past, but no idea where. Doesn't seem likely to be common.

It's better to have useful comments. Long odds are that somebody who writes comments like this absolutely isn't writing useful comments as well - in fact, I'm pretty sure I've never seen it happen. Comments like this increase cognitive overhead when reading code. Sure, I'd be happy to accept ten BS useless comments in exchange for also getting one good one, but that's not the tradeoff in reality - it's always six hundred garbage lines of comment in exchange for nothing at all. This kind of commenting usually isn't the dev's fault, though - somebody has told a junior dev that they need to comment thoroughly, without any real guidelines, and they're just trying not to get fired or whatever.

I'm nearly fifty, now. Why am I disillusioned by capitalism? Because the illusion is thin and flimsy. I really hope the disillusionment of millennials isn't just because they don't have a good enough retirement plan, or anything else that can be easily fixed. I hope that they are waking up to realize that giving unelected, unaccountable, private owners of capital control over the production and distribution of goods, services, and information, is an extremist, antidemocratic idea, that is driving the global climate crisis, and the slide toward fascism.

I mean, yes? That's kind of the point. This is how we shift the conversation and put pressure on politicians. Put these bills forward and make people vote them down on the record, so those votes can be used against them.