[Jach]

They haven't really been a plague for a while, not like they used to be. A lot of forces are behind it, my top three reasons would be 1) because of the Optional type and Optional mapping makes them easy to avoid in chained calls and is less ugly than a nest of null checks or the equivalent err != nil mess in Go, 2) because of better development practices becoming more common like SOLID and especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Demeter and 3) because of functional programming styles becoming more widely adopted, with Clojure/Scala/Kotlin showing what's possible on the same JVM.

[throwaway894345]

> less ugly than a nest of null checks or the equivalent err != nil mess in Go

"null checks are ugly and error handling is messy" are your opinions, not objective facts. I actually prefer Rust-like enums, but short of that, I think Go's error and nil handling seems quite a lot nicer in practice than Java's `Optional` facilities. Note that these are my opinions, and I'm not posing them as objective facts.

[Jach]

Using the word "ugly" marks the opinion as inherently subjective.

[throwaway894345]

In whichever case, a subjective argument is very weak.

[Jach]

Ok.