It's not a huge hole and not such a big deal. Just don't design APIs to use null. I've done it, and I can tell, you, it works! (But to be fair, I haven't wor

It's not a huge hole and not such a big deal. Just don't design APIs to use null. I've done it, and I can tell, you, it works! (But to be fair, I haven't worked on database-backed software in half a decade.) When mistakes do occur they're the trivial kind where you get a stack trace and can work it out. It's wrong to call null pointers a billion dollar mistake, too -- if we didn't have null (and in the absence of generics that permit Option, as things were long ago), programmers would end up using in-band sentinel values instead. That would be a much worse mistake.