Professor Derek “Scare-Code” Clawson, a grizzled old scarer with a missing claw and a coffee mug that said “I Debug in My Sleep,” prowled the computer lab. “Listen up, monsters!” he growled. “The new Scream Extractor 2.0 runs on Java. If you can’t write a recursive method to simulate a child’s nightmare, you’ll be filing paperwork, not scaring.”
He added a main method:
Mike let out a squeak of joy. Sulley gave him a furry high-five that nearly knocked him out of his chair.
But his code kept throwing exceptions like a frat party throws pizza.
Mike started over. He wrote a simple Child class with just three fields: name , age , fearIndex . He wrote a Scarer interface with one method: void scare(Child c) . Then he wrote a single implementation: SulleyScarer .
Here’s a short story based on the prompt The Java Scare Mike Wazowski stared at the glowing red text on his terminal. ERROR: NullPointerException at line 42.
Then he had an epiphany.