So I use C# and I often see many devs use null.

What and which kind of situation do you use this variable?

I am reading c# guide on programming book and I am on Clearing memory now and I haven't encountered null yet. Should I be worried?

Look, I get it: Null pointer exceptions are annoying but so is having to constantly check every object . against null. Is this the new religion after OOP and FP are being phased out? Null just means that the object is not initialized. It's useful to indicate such a state. If you just force yourself to initialize every object to some empty value then you're going to end up passing around empty strings - but wait, an empty string might intentionally be empty or it might indicate "please fill me".

Because I can already tell you what massive insights will come out soon: That null is actually not a mistake at all, it's useful. And the most ironic part about all this? These same people who hate on null are loving nullable types. Litearlly just types that *can be null but you just have to check every time before you use them*. So there is literally no difference except it forces you on a compiler level to check for null every time you use it. When I realized this I thought I was in dreamland, how can these people worship this meaningless little feature so much, crazy. It's literally the same as having null in the language except with a tiny tiny "advantage" that the compiler forces you to check. Which 99.9% of the time, you dont want to be forced because maybe you know implicitly and you dont care [right now].