null in languages (or None in Python) is one of the few criticisms I hear from pure-functional minded evangelists that I have come around to. Projects started b

null in languages (or None in Python) is one of the few criticisms I hear from pure-functional minded evangelists that I have come around to. Projects started by novices tend to start with no null checks at all with lines like: some.object.other.method(); Then at some point after months/years of null pointer exceptions you get a code base littered with: if (some && some.object && some.object.other && some.object.other.method) { some.object.other.method(); } Or variants like assertions / try-catch blocks / etc. This is even more cumbersome/ugly when needing to assign the result to a constant: const foo = some && some.method && some.method(); I would very much like to do away with null. There is some half-formed idea in my mind that this problem is related to how we allocate memory and the concept of the heap. I don't think syntax can solve this issue. My main issue with syntax like: const foo = some?.object?.other?.method(); Is that it encourages sloppy error handling by making the conditional branches in the code implicit. I don't condone the (a && a.b && a.b.c) pattern so I don't really want a shorthand for it.