Uncle Bob's original article was full of ideas that are just plain wrong. After reading it, I would not bother reading anything written by that author again.

Stuff like:

> Whose job is it to manage the nulls. The language? Or the programmer?

is essentially like asking "Who's job is to provide instructions for the CPU" or "Who's job is to decide about how to allocate registers during software execution".

The responsibility of a programmer (or rather software engineer) is to provide as good as possible solution to a problem. It's definitely not required to do every piece of that solution manually. If there's a way to efficiently offload any job to a computer it should be used. It can be debatable if a given way is convenient, provides good enough results etc. but "who's job is it to (...)" is just silly argument.

People with the attitude like "when men where men and took care of their own NULLs manually" are just backward minded, and ignore the fact that NULL is a nasty hack, and even its creator regrets it.