[saghm]

It seems like you're pretty fundamentally misunderstanding what the mistake is, because you have it backwards. Null is a problem because you can just use it like any other pointer without having to explicitly decide how to handle if it's null; Option does not have this problem because you have to explicitly decide how to handle if it's None. Even if you choose to crash if it's None, that's an explicit operation on an Option itself, not the underlying value. There's no equivalent way to force an explicit decision about handling null; it looks just like every other pointer, which means that the only way to avoid using it like one is to be really careful (which we have decades of empircal evidence showing might as well be impossible to do uniformly).