[discreteevent]

In my experience null pointers and unassigned variables were a big problem in C an C++. But in java? They were never something that really caused a major issue. Most of them turn up in tests and are really easy to fix because you get an exception stack. Very few turn up in production and often it is because something else failed at runtime to cause it. If the null pointer wasn't there you would have had to deal with that other failure anyway.