> In C-like languages pointers are the Maybe/Option type. I think that's a bit of a stretch, operations on Maybe types can be chained or used with Java streams

> In C-like languages pointers are the Maybe/Option type. I think that's a bit of a stretch, operations on Maybe types can be chained or used with Java streams. You can't do a thing like that with pointers. They could have dome something like java streams, given that golang has lambdas, but I guess that would not be idiomatic, or something like that... You do have a point with pattern matching, they don't do that in go. Scala has it, Java is getting pattern matching as some recent addition, but they added the Optional type with java 8.