Why aren't all the types just optional by default?

Hi Javier,

Making everything optional by default would be very cumbersome and would offer no practicality as you're creating a single method in which to write your code which makes it a static mess of if statements which is not what Swift is about, optional's should be treated as data with a value that can be nil but offer a valid type of value at some other time.

To put this in a little bit more perspective if we made something like a String an optional we would have to check if it's nil first by using an IF LET statement which would be confusing since it's never a nil value but an object which has a series of characters inside it; turning String into an optional would defeat the purpose of having methods such as isEmpty which we use to check if the string has a value.

There are many different other examples but I think that puts some simple context behind why optional's are useful in the correct circumstances and not loosely used.