That's not really the same. Messaging nil is not necessarily an error. Making it an error is just an arbitrary language choice. Messaging nil in Objective-C isn't an uncaught error, but an explicitly allowed action with fully defined results.

One could certainly argue that making nil messaging an error is better, but either way it's a different sort of reasoning.

Apple didn't invent Objective C. It has been this way since 1983, before Steve Jobs left Apple the first time:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C

Swift will happily message nil also, for example:

delegate?.someOptionalMessage?(param: param)

It's a great language feature I appreciated in Obj-C, and not lost to Swift!