Open-source libraries were much less common when Java first arrived, but third-party C / Fortran libraries were very common in many domains much before Java arr

Open-source libraries were much less common when Java first arrived, but third-party C / Fortran libraries were very common in many domains much before Java arrived. Nulls, arrays degenerating into pointers (losing size information), and accidentally crossing enum types across libraries were all huge sources of bugs. Java doesn't have much of an excuse for its treatment of nullability, other than they were trying to court C/C++ developers.