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by slmgc 3001 days ago
idx requires a transpilation step.

> you try to access a property on a value that's null (which you think isn't null), and instead of getting an error, nothing happens

You can check for Nothing if you know you shouldn't get one. It's not about swallowing errors, it's about removing try/catch and all this `a && a.b && a.b.c && a.b.c()` boilerplate code.

> Optional chaining[2] would add this to JS at the language level by using ?. as the operator

But it's not there yet and it will require a transpilation step for quite some time before all the major browsers will introduce this feature.

Nothing returns "safe" default values instead of null/undefined, which might come in useful in some cases. Also, it can be used in unit tests to mock some deeply-nested constructs.