If you work on types that might be null, you're bloody careful or you're in the wrong profession. We're not calling incompetent programmers a gazillion dollar mistake, even though they probably have caused as much.
I would agree that the real world can bait one in the ass, out of the blue, just, what the, things are trying to eat my ass!
As for herding spherical cows and the vacuum, I'll do my best:
val maybeCow = Some(1) // SomeOne is the speherical mu (i.e. you)
maybeCow getOrElse 0 // Cow here becomes 1 with the universe
Were maybeCow initialized with a None value, then into the vacuum it goes...and out it comes with a safe 0 to keep order in our [application] universe.
I'm very amused. About 80% of my career has been in the "real world", so I have actually have some authority in calling this. No power in the world can subvert incompetence.
Look everyone, dscrd has solved the problem of software having bugs. Just be careful! Man, why didn't anyone think of that before? The software industry is going to be so much nicer now that you eliminated bugs.