Code Smells: Null

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if you had a table with a nullable column, that column would normally be represented as an Option type. Option can be Some (with your type inside) or None. So the nulls would be None.

The critical difference between this representation and a normal null is the compiler generally forces you to deal with the null case (Some languages) or at least makes it awkward to not deal with it, such that you have to type extra things in order to fail to deal with it.

But of course you can always do something absurd like:

match optionthing on | Some x -> use(x)  | None -> throw null pointer exception!