Seems reasonable. Null pointers are rumored to have cost billions in waste and failures. And they're trivial to fix with a little bit of static typing.
Not sure I would call it "trivial." You just trade your segfault (or NullPointerException) for a pattern match error.
Although that little bit of static typing would probably have dealt with the vast majority of expensive null-pointer bugs.
Well, trivial in relation to a company rebuilding its product on a new programming language or paradigm.
The pattern match error can be detected at compile time. The NPE is not.
Not if you enable compiler errors for inexhaustive matches. Are there any compilers for mainstream languages that can flag all possible segfault/NPE locations as errors?