I don't see any technical reason why Kotlin couldn't have done the same. Kotlin does do the same. I totally disagree with GP's assertion that Kotlin has no nul

I don't see any technical reason why Kotlin couldn't have done the same. Kotlin does do the same. I totally disagree with GP's assertion that Kotlin has no null safety. I use both Kotlin and Clojure and I find Kotlin much better than either Clojure or Java with respect to NPEs.