Yeah, that's fair, clearly this sort of thing is why we have multiple languages in the first place! I don't think I'll ever abandon the idea that making code "

Yeah, that's fair, clearly this sort of thing is why we have multiple languages in the first place! I don't think I'll ever abandon the idea that making code "correct by construction" is a good goal. It might not always be achievable or practical but I strongly feel it's always something to aim for. For me, silent zero initialization compromises that because there isn't always a safe default. I think nil pointers are like NaNs in arithmetic. When a nil or a NaN crops up, it's too late to do anything useful with it, you generally have to work backwards in the debugger to figure out where the real problem started. I'd much rather be notified of problems immediately, and if that's at compile time, even better. In the real world, sure, I don't code review every single arithmetic operation to see if it might overflow or divide by zero. But when the compiler can spot potential problem areas and force me to check them, that's really useful.