I think this is a symptom of using weakly typed languages as well. If your argument types are declared to be options/eithers, then you need to handle the empty case, but usually it's easier and better to just move that optional handling further up the callstack or type system.
A lot of `if (input == null)` checks are because you're just not sure whether the argument being passed in will have a value, and it's too much work for your small feature PR to refactor the whole codebase to resolve it.
Use typescript/python-with-mypy/haskell/rust/whatever and this problem mostly disappears.
> A lot of `if (input == null)` checks are because you're just not sure whether the argument being passed in will have a value, and it's too much work for your small feature PR to refactor the whole codebase to resolve it.
Null checks are totally fine, but it should be clear whether or not null is a valid input to the method. If the answer is 'no' then you should throw ArgumentNullException (or whatever's appropriate for the language), not silently ignore the bad input.
A lot of `if (input == null)` checks are because you're just not sure whether the argument being passed in will have a value, and it's too much work for your small feature PR to refactor the whole codebase to resolve it.
Use typescript/python-with-mypy/haskell/rust/whatever and this problem mostly disappears.