[skgoa]

It's the Java approach. Don't give people footguns and force them to write software in a readable, testable, maintainable style. It works extremely well in software engineering, because you want systems that work reliably and that can be maintained/extended by any other engineer at your org. In the professional software engineering world, "clever" programmers are almost always a horrible drag on their team.

[masklinn]

It's not the Java approach at all. The first languages to remove ubiquitous nulls (e.g. MLs) were looking to increase expressivity and modeling abilities, not to force bondage and discipline upon developers.