There are a lot of ways in which Go handles nil better than C handles NULL. At the very least, a panic is better than a segfault. And carefully written code can avoid most kinds of nil panics entirely. So I guess the language's authors thought this would be enough to overcome the mistake. But I don't think they went far enough. The very limited type system and the lack of nil-safe operators make it not very ergonomic to write and read such "carefully written" code; design decisions in some key parts of the standard library completely undermine the language's attempts to minimize nil; and then there's the "untyped nil" default value for interfaces, which panics if you just look at it funny.

What’s a brilliant language in this context