title: Why Is UITextField.text An Optional?
body: <p>It starts out as an empty string instead of nil. Even when it is explicitly set to nil it remains an empty string. I don't get it. Perhaps to make it easy to clear by assigning nil? Writing code with it is clunky.   </p>
  
  <pre><code>var textField = UITextField()
  print(textField.text) // prints "Optional("")"
  textField.text = nil
  print(textField.text) // prints "Optional("")"
  </code></pre>