I guess this is a specific example of the Blub Paradox. I saw this a lot when Swift came out. Suddenly a lot of Objective-C programmers were learning a new lan

I guess this is a specific example of the Blub Paradox. I saw this a lot when Swift came out. Suddenly a lot of Objective-C programmers were learning a new language with a fairly different type system, and it was tough. The Optional type was an especially strong pain point. What I found particularly interesting is that C (and Objective-C) has optional types. All pointer types are optionals. What it lacks is optional non-pointer types, and non-optional pointer types. Because optionality is an inherent part of pointer types in the language, you never learn to think about optionality separately. It's like a fish in water: it's so common you don't even see it. I suppose it would show up even more strongly with someone used to a language like Ruby. If C programmers have a hard time really grasping the idea of optionality because the language doesn't make it explicit, then a Ruby programmer might have trouble with static types at all. (And, to be fair, the same no doubt applies in the other direction: someone coming from a strong statically typed language probably has some hurdles to understanding dynamic type systems.)