[sjolsen]

>NULL is a handy way to enforce that fundamentally, in that dereferencing a null pointer guarantees a crash

In the context of C and C++, dereferencing a null pointer does not guarantee a crash, or anything else for that matter. In fact, not only does it not give you any guarantees, it nullifies any guarantees you might otherwise have had, because the behaviour of a program that dereferences a null pointer is undefined. Now, an implementation is of course free to make guarantees about programs that have undefined behaviour, but none I know of does.

>Part of programming is about memory management. You can hide it with a sophisticated compiler but it's always going to be there, and there are always going to be two types of memory: that which is available, and that which is not.

This is not true. It is perfectly possible to write useful programs that never have to deal with unavailable memory or even memory management at all past compile time, even in C. This is quite common (as are implementations that don't crash programs which dereference null pointers) when working with embedded systems, for example.