In that case, do you condsider Go's nil to not be a null, since you can call methods on it that can do whatever? Or how about objective C's nil, where any messa

In that case, do you condsider Go's nil to not be a null, since you can call methods on it that can do whatever? Or how about objective C's nil, where any messages sent to it are simply ignored? Edit: I see now that you're talking about the difference between null and Result/Option, not the difference between null/Option and Unit, so we're talking about different things. Semantically, a value that could be data or null is equivalent to an option type. Option types have methods, yes, but that's just a superficial convenience facility, you could implement the same thing for nullable types by writing a function: public static <A, B> B map(A object, Function<A, B> f) { if (object == null) return null; return f.apply(object); }