From a web developer's perspective, I think the problem is that the people who built these systems were too nice.

Let me explain.

Web browsers have the option to reject syntax errors in HTML and immediately fail, but they don't. Similarly, I think compilers could be a bit slower, check a few more things, and refuse to produce an output if a pointer could be null.

I'm just a code monkey, so I don't have all the answers, but is it possible to have a rule like "when in doubt, throw an error"? The code might be legal, but we aren't here to play code golf. Why not deny such "clever" code with a vengeance and let us mortals live our lives? Can compilers do that by default?