On the contrary, nil punning seems exceptionally well suited to a dynamic language. In general, I'm only burned by nil propagating into Java, almost all Clojure code seems to handle nil appropriately.

I'm unsure of a good way to represent optionality in a dynamic language without a static type system. Or rather, doing so with the tools available -- core.match vs real pattern matching -- seems rather un-ergonomic.

I'm curious about your thoughts of what would be better.