[macrael]

Not to get in the way of the fun, but my point at the start was less about the semantics of an Optional type in particular, but more about how in the absence of an Optional (or I suppose a nil value) people abuse nil pointers as a stand-in, and that's been a source of lots of bugs I've seen.

The language was designed without a nil value opting instead for an empty value. It turns out that in lots of real-world applications some kind of affordance for "this doesn't exist" is so common that even standard libraries use nil pointers to model that. That leads to bugs because now lots of things are pointers that don't actually need to be passed by reference and the language's affordance for _everything_ being able to be passed by value is being circumvented. An optional type (even without any full blown support for sum types in the language) would have solved this problem neatly.