Scala carries some baggage from being on the JVM that makes this not-quite-true, but it mostly enforces all of those things in the type system. There's no null

Scala carries some baggage from being on the JVM that makes this not-quite-true, but it mostly enforces all of those things in the type system. There's no null-checking required, and if something can fail, the type system should tell you. e.g. your method signatures will read doSomethingRisky(): Try[Result] and to use that value you'll either have to carry that Try forward, or handle its failure cases.