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While I've enjoyed the Elvis operator in Groovy, the point of optional is to make null go away altogether. In Groovy, you are never guaranteed anything isn't null, so the end result is that you will Elvis everything. While this is easier than the good old if statements, you are still paying for the penalty of a billion ifs in bytecode. With option, you clearly declare what is safe, and what isn't, and the compiler won't let you screw up. You can decide which layer of your code handles the empty case, and lots of unnecessary ifs go away from the bytecode itself, so the app will run faster, and you know when you have to even consider the null case. Now, doing that in Groovy is rather silly, because your language is dynamic and your types are optional, so all of this compile time safety would not provide any value anyway. Option is just the way you'd solve the problem in the strongly typed way. It's how you handle it in Scala, for instance, and how Haskell would deal with it. As far as using flatmaps and maps to work with optionals, yes, it's a chore. I'd argue it's borderline abuse of the stream operators, as treating Option as a collection is ugly. That said, putting yourself in a situation where you chain 3 optional getters is also object design from hell, so one should avoid putting themselves in that position altogether. In Scala, instead of flatmapping single optionals, we often getOrElse(), or use pattern matching as an extractor. Now that's a feature I would like to see Java 'steal' from the Scalas and Erlangs of the world, but I do not see that happening. |