[setr]

You’d have to unwrap, usually with convenient mechanism for it —pattern matching

The problem is that id = id is fundamentally incorrect for a nullable column. You should have done id is not null and id = id. And you shouldn’t have been allowed to do the first anyways, because nothing good can come of it (there is no sane semantics to stuffing a trinary logic into a boolean algebra, and SQL chooses one of the many insane options, leading to both false positive and false negative matches depending.) the only correct answer is not to do that.

[munk-a]

I can understand how that would make things more explicit - but given how common nullability is in the realm of databases I think it'd be a bad idea to force that much syntax in a situation where id=id is essentially what we want to discuss - especially since columns becoming potentially null is so trivial to achieve (even when impossible due to model constraints) as soon as you start throwing left joins in the mix.

[elbear]

Sometimes you really want explicit, rather than dealing with the errors caused by implicitness. And with a language that has proper support for things like Maybe, there isn't that much syntax.

It's true that you have to adopt a completely different language, but when that language saves you from potentially expensive bugs, it becomes appealing.