Well, probably trillion dollar one by now; It's not just the null pointer bugs that waste time, it's the fact language is designed around them that's the problem
> null pointer dereferences are empirically the easiest class of invalid memory addresses to catch at runtime, and are the least common kind of invalid memory addresses that happen in memory unsafe languages.
and yet I still see them popping up in memory-safe languages
> In statically typed compiled manual-memory managed languages, it’s not as much of a problem empirically compared to the set of invalid memory address problems, of which most of them are solved with a different mindset.
that's moving goalpost away from original claim; it wasn't "billion dollar mistake" in context of ALGOL, it was one because oh so many other languages, static or dynamic, managed or unmanaged, copied that behavior
> null pointer dereferences are empirically the easiest class of invalid memory addresses to catch at runtime, and are the least common kind of invalid memory addresses that happen in memory unsafe languages.
and yet I still see them popping up in memory-safe languages
> In statically typed compiled manual-memory managed languages, it’s not as much of a problem empirically compared to the set of invalid memory address problems, of which most of them are solved with a different mindset.
that's moving goalpost away from original claim; it wasn't "billion dollar mistake" in context of ALGOL, it was one because oh so many other languages, static or dynamic, managed or unmanaged, copied that behavior