You are right regarding the dynamic language, well, dynamic. I haven't put any thought into it and I can't come up with a viable solution of eliminating nil without some type system strategy (Maybe/Either Monads in Haskell, Option in Rust, etc). It's kind of a bummer, because I love the Lisp dialect of Clojure, but really appreciate software projects that I've written in the past that don't crash due to a forgotten potential nil value handling.

You do have a point!