Meme transcription: Panel 1. Two images of JSON, one is the empty object, one is an object in which the key name maps to the value null. Caption: “Corporate needs you to find the difference between this picture and this picture”
Panel 2. The Java backend dev answers, “They’re the same picture.”
For many uses it is semantically the same.
But for cases where you need to know if something was intentionally set to null or was simply not set, the difference is enormous.