> One of the most common programming mistakes of all, dubbed by Hoare himself as the "billion dollar mistake": null pointers, yet it was put into go without any consideration.

I get the distinct impression that people who invoke this boilerplate Hoare quote argument don't understand that null pointer bugs are "a billion dollar mistake" because nullable pointers have been idiomatic in every major programming language for the last 40+ years, not because they are individually particularly expensive.

Yeah, Rust-like enums would probably be strictly better than null pointers, but people talk about null pointers like they are going to doom your project when in reality they're mere papercuts--a small subset of all type errors--and there are whole projects that are written in fully dynamically typed languages! Indeed, there are worse problems than type errors in a language--you could have an impoverished ecosystem, poor tools (especially build tools), or abysmal performance, and many of the most popular programming languages have two of the three and null pointers. Go is fortunate to have only null pointers (papercuts) working against it.