I agree that null should generally be banned from Scala code, but your statement is a little too strong. I use Spark / Scala for big data applications and Opti

I agree that null should generally be banned from Scala code, but your statement is a little too strong. I use Spark / Scala for big data applications and Option() is slower than null. From the Databricks Scala style guide: "For performance sensitive code, prefer null over Option, in order to avoid virtual method calls and boxing."