OO advocate tells me it's possible to be precise with no formalism. This is a trap. It's the reason we got so lost in the hype of 80's/90's OO. Demand a formalism. Otherwise we're stuck in the reference implementation hell, living the defects, instead of designing them away.
-
Null is incredibly convenient to programmers and you piss them off when you try and take it away. “Hey, just use these options and explicit unwraps for everything” never went down well. Don’t just assume these choices were made for petty rather than pragmatic reasons.
If you believe using Option is more clumsy than using null, you've really missed the point of the data structure, and doing it very wrong. You'll never be able to show the code where using null is easier. Never.
