Why does everyone hate nulls?_

Tony Hoare introduced null references in ALGOL W back in 1965 and later called it his billion-dollar mistake. C# 8 introduced nullable reference types to help, but I still see NullReferenceException in every codebase I touch. Are we just bad at using the tools, or is null fundamentally broken?

The required keyword forces callers to initialize properties. Combined with primary constructor syntax in C# 12 it removes a whole class of uninitialized-field bugs without needing nullable gymnastics.

Enable <Nullable>enable</Nullable> in your .csproj and treat every warning as an error. After a few weeks of pain it becomes second nature and your code gets dramatically safer. The ?. and ?? operators do most of the heavy lifting. string? name = GetName(); var display = name ?? "Anonymous";

In functional languages you use Option<T> / Maybe<T> instead of null. There are C# libraries like LanguageExt that bring this pattern over. You get compiler-enforced exhaustive handling instead of hoping nobody forgot a null check.