OP here - I was going to go into that - it's an interesting story. There are null references, as you say, but there's also the null object pattern and the null type. I decided to just focus on the idea of null, which all three of those things represent. A pointer points to a null space, a type represents a value that can optionally be null, and the object pattern allows you to deal with null in your program directly (like Ruby's nil).

So... yeah I dig it man :) I just left some things out to keep on a pace.