What is so clever about a nil object check?

I suppose if you're using it to make skirting the "Law of Demeter" and thats something you don't want to do it could seem like something bad.

But I'll take "foo?.bar()" over "foo.bar() if foo" gladly.

The issue is in an expression like "out = foo?.bar()". What I want is to only assign to out if foo exists, but the compiler has no way of knowing that-- it'll evaluate to undefined instead. In this situation I need to use "out = foo.bar() if foo".

That's easy enough to remember, though.

Yeah, I can see the argument in favor of it. Easy to miss when reading through code, but arguably unlikely to be used on a way where it would really matter if you missed it while scanning.

I found myself trying to decide whether or not to use it the other day and decided for now it was too clever. So I guess the jury is out in my own head, maybe not in anyone else's.

I find it quite useful in Io, including chained expressions.