Save $1 billion with the Option type

Tony Hoare, who introduced null references in 1965, described them as “The Billion Dollar Mistake” in this speech in 2009. No matter how much experience you have, I believe that you have had problems caused by null pointers in any programming language such as NullPointerException in Java, NoMethodError in Ruby or a segfault in C. Since these issues occur at runtime, the odds are that you were paged in the middle of the night as the on-call engineer at some point in your career.

My brief history with the Option type