I’m amazed at the amount of code that I see that contains uninitialized variables. I can’t think of a bigger bang-for-the-buck habit you can fall into than taking an extra 2 seconds to properly initialize whatever variable you’ve created. Look, I know a lot of ORM layers use NULL variables as a flag to insert/select/update null values. I get it. I don’t love it, but I get it. Other than that, I can’t think of a single reason to not initialize your variables. Unless you love NullPointerExceptions, or security exploits, or constantly having to check for null before you call a method on an object you just got back, or who know whatever else people have done to themselves because they were to lazy to add ” = 0;” after their variable declarations. Coding is hard enough as it is. This just makes it harder.

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