[wool_gather]

The point stands, however, that just because developers are forced to handle the `nil` somehow, doesn't mean they're handling it in a sensible way that makes for consistent UX. Crashing sucks from a user perspective, obviously data corruption is even worse, but just throwing up your hands and returning early from a view controller method doesn't really do anything for the user either.

I generally find it useful to have the concept of Optional, making me think about "could this thing be missing?" explicitly. But I've started to wonder if it is, rather than "preventing an entire class of bugs", actually just making them pop up elsewhere when Optional values start brushing up against that top level of user-visible stuff.

Maybe we (I) just need to get better at thinking about missing data conditions at the product design stage, or more robust defaults.

[jchb]

> when Optional values start brushing up against that top level of user-visible stuff

Perhaps you are under-using sum types - or enums with associated values as they are called in Swift. Difficult to get into details in this format, but for example, instead of:

`enum State { case connected(Connection, SomeOtherStateRelatedToConnected) case disconnected }

let state: State `

You have: ` var connection: Connection? var someOtherState: SomeOtherStateRelatedToConnected? `