This is a brilliant talk, and it gives excellent reasons for most design decisions — except making error handling "intentionally clumsy". Why not borrow what i

This is a brilliant talk, and it gives excellent reasons for most design decisions — except making error handling "intentionally clumsy". Why not borrow what is arguably the most important Erlang feature, process linking and supervision? However, this talk does not mention some questionable decisions, such as keeping null references in the language. Why would you do that, instead of using option types? Can you comment on generics in ML-derived languages?