> Also, I don't understand how people use the `Optional <ErasedType>`..? I may be misunderstanding your question, but in general you wouldn't be doing anything

> Also, I don't understand how people use the `Optional <ErasedType>`..? I may be misunderstanding your question, but in general you wouldn't be doing anything type-specific with an Optional's value unless you were in a part of your code that knows the type at compile time. For example, a data structure might return an Optional<T> from a get() method, but all it's doing is returning the T or an empty. > Besides all references types are already nullable/(optional)... so what's the point? 1. It's nice to explicitly say if a value might not exist than to be unsure if a null object is meaningful. 2. It can force consumers of an Optional to deal with the empty case (versus forgetting to null check) 3. Null might mean something like "this value was accidentally never initialized" versus "I am explicitly indicating an empty value" 4. It can give better developer ergonomics with convenience methods or monadic style (such as with Scala's Option type, where you could .map() on an Option, or merge multiple Options together)