And `head []` will explode at runtime in Haskell. How is it relevant? Type systems can never prove every interesting property of a problem. Yeah, nulls suck, but there is very good static analysis for Java.
I just don’t feel that it would be fair criticism, since by that definition, none of the following languages are safer than C: C++, C#, Java, JS, Go, even Scala.
So basically the litany of languages having null..
All of those languages (possibly except for C++) are safer, in general, than C. But C#, Java, JS and Go aren't more type safe than C. I don't know how it works in Scala.
I just don't consider the language to be "type safe" when every single variable (except for primitives) can explode at runtime with no warning from the type system. At least with C++ you can have references which you know won't be null.
The fact that you bring up JS, a language with _literally no static type checking_, confuses me. Are we even talking about the same thing? Maybe I should've used the phrase static type safety rather than type safety? I thought it was clear from context (as a response to "with Java if it compiles it definitely works"), but maybe not.
