Of course you're right! That statement was intended to be hyperbolic. I'm not actually suggesting that it would be a good idea to NOT have zero-sized collection

Of course you're right! That statement was intended to be hyperbolic. I'm not actually suggesting that it would be a good idea to NOT have zero-sized collections. I'm just exasperated that most of these modern, statically typed languages, give us TWO ways to write "nothing" (null and empty) and ZERO ways to write "must have something". You COULD, theoretically, write a concat() that takes multiple, nullable, non-empty strings and returns a nullable non-empty string. Of course that's not ideal and would be horribly unergonomic. But you COULD do it. But how do you write a concat() that statically guarantees that if any of its arguments are non-empty that its output will be non-empty? You pretty much don't.