Right. The language makes you check for nulls at the few places where the result can go null, and all other tedious null-checking goes away forever. All the ad

Right. The language makes you check for nulls at the few places where the result can go null, and all other tedious null-checking goes away forever. All the advanced type system jiggery-pokery aside -- that's probably the best "normal programmer" example of why ML & Haskell do static typing better. The ALGOL family of languages should have done that years (decades!) ago.