[Fiadliel]

There are three things that help:

1. the large number of values that you now know definitely have a value, and you can access without fear that they don't.

2. the helper functions for Maybe that let you deal with optionality in various ways; the possibilities are extensive and useful. null doesn't give you any help, and generally any helper syntax is limited to one or two possibilities.

3. Code cannot fail due to trying to access a null pointer accidentally. Functions that definitely return a value (ignoring severe issues like OOM, etc.) is a somewhat useful property.