[ken]

> If "a thing can't be null/nothing", then you've made an error in making it an optional.

I don't disagree with this, but I can point out gobs of places in AppKit where Apple has arguably 'made an error' and I can't do anything about it. Or in third-party C libraries, which hold 99% of the functionality I ultimately need, and were not designed for having nice Swift programming interfaces.

I feel like everyone saying "never force unwrap!" must be writing pure-Swift standalone functions, with no dependencies, including the operating system. The API for writing items to the Mac clipboard still documents that it can throw exceptions, which are impossible to catch in Swift!