We've been using Optional<T> a lot in recent years (via Guava). It's useful, and has certainly reduced the number of NPE we've had slip through as it forces the

We've been using Optional<T> a lot in recent years (via Guava). It's useful, and has certainly reduced the number of NPE we've had slip through as it forces the developer to consider nullability up front. Looking forward to migrating to the Java 8 version when we upgrade to that JDK. One addition that would be useful would be some syntactical sugar to reduce the verbosity of using Optional<T>. But otherwise I'm happy and if you combine with @Nonnull and @Nullable annotations you get the best of both worlds.