[RubenSandwich]

After some digging, I think Groovy got it first. Here is a blog post from 2009 about it: https://mrhaki.blogspot.com/2009/08/groovy-goodness-safe-nav....

[leshow]

Cool, thanks for this. Rust/Swift's variant is arguably a little different (because it works with a sum type) but I think the influence is pretty clear here.