Go and Scala also allow every pointer to be null, no? Scala has an option type, but so does Java 8. Defining one in C# is easy.

But there is Ceylon, Kotlin, Clojure, whatever. Kotlin uses ? suffixes to define if something is optional. And at least the code interops nicely. You can inherit a huge Java codebase and slowly convert the code over. No such luck with Go. Unless you're converting into C!

C# and Java optionals aren't very useful, since they would be reference types themselves, and thus could be null!

I would submit Rust and Swift as "decent" type systems, if Haskell is the standard for "good". They do nullability correctly, but lack HKTs.

C# has non-nullable value types via the `struct` keyword. And C# in fact already has a defined optional type to handle this; it's called `Nullable`. [0]

[0] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b3h38hb0%28v=vs.110...

In Scala, Option[Whatever] may also be null. The difference is that it's considered "some Java compatibility leftover" and never exploited by any sane piece of code.