[zbentley]

I think you’re arguing against a point that GP didn’t make. Optionality and empty/uninitialized references can both be encoded in a type system, or one, or the other.

I didn’t interpret GP as arguing for or against null or otherwise rehashing what you correctly identify as one of the oldest intractable arguments in programming. The sibling comments not so much.

[diarrhea]

Yes, my point was not related to null. For all I care you can have `&T` and `Option<&T>` in your language, but allow `&T` to be null. In Rust, that would be `Option<*const T>`. Is that useful? I don't know. But it still separates the two orthogonal concepts. Go conflates them, rolling them into one, permanently removing useful expressivity.