And that having everything being 'implicitly nullable' is a categorically worse for maintainability, readability and comprehensibility than using explicit Option<T> types at the boundaries; such as the implementation in F# [1], with an expressive matching syntax.
It is now common when creating a library to rely on manual checking and coders explicitly writing code to check and throw NullArgument exceptions for each object parameter in every public method, and then writing dozens or hundreds more pointless unit tests to ensure this null exception behaviour works as expected; this is totally unnecessary in languages that demand explicitly stated Option<T> when an Option is meaningful.
Instead of requiring all the above for safety -an approach which will notably fail to report any errors if the null argument checks are partially or completely omitted- we have -and we should prefer- languages where the compiler or interpreter will not let us pass null into a function where null makes no sense, because that fact is encoded in the function definition.
At the library boundaries, which are comparatively rare to internal code, we can simply use the explicit Option type.
I should note I have one objeciton with the F# implementation - in that I think that ideally the properties { .IsSome, .IsNone, .Value } should not exist, as they promote bad programming practices.
It is now common when creating a library to rely on manual checking and coders explicitly writing code to check and throw NullArgument exceptions for each object parameter in every public method, and then writing dozens or hundreds more pointless unit tests to ensure this null exception behaviour works as expected; this is totally unnecessary in languages that demand explicitly stated Option<T> when an Option is meaningful.
Instead of requiring all the above for safety -an approach which will notably fail to report any errors if the null argument checks are partially or completely omitted- we have -and we should prefer- languages where the compiler or interpreter will not let us pass null into a function where null makes no sense, because that fact is encoded in the function definition.
At the library boundaries, which are comparatively rare to internal code, we can simply use the explicit Option type.
I should note I have one objeciton with the F# implementation - in that I think that ideally the properties { .IsSome, .IsNone, .Value } should not exist, as they promote bad programming practices.
[1] https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/the-option-type/