Comment by graphitemaster

I mostly agree. Null pointer de-references aren't a dominant or hard-to-detect failure mode for my code either. Removing them does meaningfully complicate language design and ergonomics too. It's reasonable to call them a "problem" in the same sense that any invalid memory address is a problem. I also see value in making invalid states unrepresentable which would mean disallowing null pointers right? The real question is whether that gurantee is worth the cost in ergonomics, compiler surface area, and C compatibility. Every invariant a compiler enforces consumes complexity budget. I agree with the author that it's better to keep the core language small and spend that budget on higher-impact guarantees. And the thesis here seems to be that null pointers aren't high-impact enough (and at least for the code I've read and wrote, this seems to hold true). I suspect that part of the appeal is that null pointers are low-hanging fruit. They're easy to point out and relatively easy to "solve" in the type system, which can make the win feel larger than it actually is. The marginal benefit feels smaller than spending that complexity budget on harder, higher-impact guarantees that target the logical traps programmers fall into with clever, highly abstracted code, where bugs are more subtle and systemic rather than immediate and loud.