[Sharlin]

The usage pattern is somewhat different. The primary problem with null references in languages such as Java is that they are not opt-in, and they're not even opt-out! That is to say, you don't even have an option (heh!) to encode in the type system the fact that a reference is never null. What's worse, references tend to get passed around a lot, and stored inside objects, and programmers are lazy and don't assert or even think about preconditions, so the root cause of an unexpected NPE can be far removed from the code that finally triggers it.

With code that indexes slices, the index computation is usually much more proximate to the actual indexing operation. If ensuring the validity of the index is about upholding an invariant internal to the module, it makes no sense to return an "sorry, I have a bug" error to the caller if that invariant fails to hold. What would the caller do about that?