There are patterns that experienced developers will use to avoid issues with nulls. Here are a couple off the top of my head. 1) Reversing string comparisons:

There are patterns that experienced developers will use to avoid issues with nulls. Here are a couple off the top of my head. 1) Reversing string comparisons: "literal".equals(variable) instead of variable.equals("literal") 2) Always initializing lists instead of leaving them to default to null public class SomeClass{ private List someList=new ArrayList(); //or Collections.emptyList() ... } The problems with NullPointerExceptions can mostly be solved by teaching programmers to use these strategies and teaching them to look for boundaries where nulls can slip in. The real problem happens when things get scaled up. If you have thousands of developers then it makes sense to take steps to automate the problem away. Also, if the code is used by billions of users then even rare NullPointerExceptions will happen frequently. So it makes perfect sense for Facebook to be the one to work on this.