My experience is they helped a lot. a) basically never happened (I have a vague recollection of catching one in code review, but usually my reviews would instea

My experience is they helped a lot. a) basically never happened (I have a vague recollection of catching one in code review, but usually my reviews would instead be "instead of returning null here, use Optional please" or figuring out a way to avoid nulls entirely (e.g. empty list when returning collections)) b) I think both Eclipse and IntelliJ will issue a warning if you perform an Optional.get() without an isPresent() check c) it seems less verbose and more readable than null checks, especially if you have a map chain/are using Streams. It could be even nicer, like what Kotlin has, but it's an improvement.