That's an interesting point, and a fair question. I didn't actually want to imply that lacking checked exceptions unreasonable. I was merely trying to paraph

That's an interesting point, and a fair question. I didn't actually want to imply that lacking checked exceptions unreasonable. I was merely trying to paraphrase isthe null problem in terms of checked exceptions, which the person I was replying to seems to favour. It was just an attempt to create an "aha" moment, showing what kind of pain is created by allowing null references. A proper answer would probably have a lot more substance to it, but in short I get the feeling that null-free programming is a lot easier to achieve in general than exception-free programming. In fact, in most cases, not allowing nulls seems to be the implied default, yet it's hard (or impossible) to declare this explicitly (in most languages, like Java, etc). It just happens to be an extremely common problem that can be solved in a nice way, unlike exception checking in the general. TL;DR: The added safety that is given by allowing the type system to reason about nulls - when looked at in the light of the amount of boilerplate code that it creates - compares favourably to checked exceptions.