[The_Colonel]

> Those just are not enough for many of us to warrant the switch.

I understand that, but for starting new projects the equation can be different.

> many of us don’t struggle with null

Sorry, but I don't believe there's anybody like that. I guess many people accepted/internalized the struggle.

[ivan_gammel]

Null safety at application level is just a good architecture, test coverage and regular code reviews. It is not an internalized struggle of any sort. Last time I saw uncaught NPE in server logs was a long time ago: why would it necessarily be more frequent than some data validation error?

[The_Colonel]

> Null safety at application level is just a good architecture, test coverage and regular code reviews.

Anything relying on that is brittle. I work on a 20 years old code base with the majority of the base classes being 15+ years old. This is exactly where Java should shine, and it's not doing bad, but it's very hard to enforce top-notch coding standards across ~200 devs committing during that time frame.

As a result, there isn't much of an information on the nullability of return types, and you end up defensively handling nulls everywhere which is just noise.

> Last time I saw uncaught NPE in server logs was a long time ago

Luckily these are rare also for us, I guess most are caught during development and then on some test environment / CI, but catching these anytime later than compilation is way too late. The cost of a bug is directly connected with time between introduction and fixing it.

[vips7L]

> I understand that, but for starting new projects the equation can be different.

I don't think for new projects the equation is any different. Why would I throw away a language and ecosystem that I understand, that I'm productive in and with language designers that I trust to do the correct thing for the future? Why go learn another language and ecosystem when the things it brings to the table are of no value _to me_ ?

I honestly do not struggle with null. If you actually read the code you call and test the code you write you won't have a problem.

[The_Colonel]

> Why go learn another language and ecosystem when the things it brings to the table are of no value _to me_ ?

The language is conceptually very similar and ecosystem is shared to a large degree.

> I honestly do not struggle with null. If you actually read the code you call and test the code you write you won't have a problem.

Looks like you work on small projects only. If you can just read the code you call, then you don't need much of a type system at all.

In my case, the call I make often executes 10,000s of lines of code and figuring out if it can return null in some cases can take hours or days.

[vips7L]

> Looks like you work on small projects only.

Don’t be dismissive. I could easily just say “looks like you’re just a bad dev if you can’t handle null.”

I work on large code bases too. There’s nothing special about them.

[The_Colonel]

It's very hard to take you seriously if your argument is "just read the code you call to figure out if it returns null or not". That just isn't feasible in large code bases.

[kaba0]

It sounds like badly documented code then. A function, especially if some kind of API boundary, should absolutely state whether it can or can’t return null.

Ideally everything should be non-nullable, with optionally specified nullability.

[The_Colonel]

> It sounds like badly documented code then. A function, especially if some kind of API boundary, should absolutely state whether it can or can’t return null.

Of course, in the type system.

Just like we're "documenting" types themselves in the type system and not in JavaDocs.