The answer is to make enums explicit e.g. malloc should return either a valid allocation or an error, but you can't easily do that in C. It takes a richer/bette

The answer is to make enums explicit e.g. malloc should return either a valid allocation or an error, but you can't easily do that in C. It takes a richer/better type system to make this convenient to use and safe from accidents. Depending on your language and compiler the in memory representation for a nullable and a non-nullable pointer can be the same, but a well designed type system can prevent fallible human programmers from confusing one for the other. Add some destructuring pattern matching to the language the usability improves instead of suffers. Rust added a whole lot more which made the syntax very noisy.