It's an impedance mismatch with every programming language I personally know, which all permit the empty string. Even Erlang or Haskell, with their oddball strings that are actually lists, permit an empty/null list for this purpose. What might they be? Maybe it's a blank line from an array of chomped input lines, maybe it's a base case of a recursive operation (see also: you can't have an empty set, possibly related, maybe DynamoDB stores strings as lists...).
The point is, sometimes we have the empty string as a legitimate scalar value, so rejecting them creates extra work for the developer and feels like a POLA* violation, even if there's a solid underlying technical reason why it is so (and maybe there is, maybe it's due to a Merkle tree for the values, as suggested in the predecessor Dynamo's original paper). It's the kind of thing that leads people to develop wrappers for things that really shouldn't need them, which is a gateway drug into all sorts of unnecessary abstractions and extra work.
At the other end of the spectrum I've seen some hilaribad JSON structures, ones where a value might be absent, or null, or the empty string, or a real string, and these four things all have different meanings /o\.
It's an impedance mismatch with every programming language I personally know, which all permit the empty string. Even Erlang or Haskell, with their oddball strings that are actually lists, permit an empty/null list for this purpose. What might they be? Maybe it's a blank line from an array of chomped input lines, maybe it's a base case of a recursive operation (see also: you can't have an empty set, possibly related, maybe DynamoDB stores strings as lists...).
The point is, sometimes we have the empty string as a legitimate scalar value, so rejecting them creates extra work for the developer and feels like a POLA* violation, even if there's a solid underlying technical reason why it is so (and maybe there is, maybe it's due to a Merkle tree for the values, as suggested in the predecessor Dynamo's original paper). It's the kind of thing that leads people to develop wrappers for things that really shouldn't need them, which is a gateway drug into all sorts of unnecessary abstractions and extra work.
At the other end of the spectrum I've seen some hilaribad JSON structures, ones where a value might be absent, or null, or the empty string, or a real string, and these four things all have different meanings /o\.
* Principle of Least Astonishment.