Thank you, this is very helpful. I tend to think of the Option/Maybe type as signaling to the reader a SQL-like 3VL value, where the distinction between having

Thank you, this is very helpful. I tend to think of the Option/Maybe type as signaling to the reader a SQL-like 3VL value, where the distinction between having a thing and not having a thing is not contingent on the thing-in-itself. Clearly, I need to lift my level of thinking up at least one level of abstraction. > I don't know what makes people say things like this. It's a social and not a technical analogy (although I think the technical analogy is stronger than you apparently do). C++ took an established industry language and opened the door to a whole new level of abstraction; just as you can write C in C++ (missing the whole point), you can write Java in Scala (again, missing the point). C++'s affordances to prevent this were weaker than Scala's, which means that the acceptance of Scala's idiomatic way will probably happen much faster than that of C++'s did. It wasn't intended to be a derogatory analogy; I admire modern C++, even as I am happy not to be writing it.