That is not a fair description to Java or the team that has created it. Do you actually think that James Gosling, Guy Steele, Brian Goetz, Doug Lea, etc. are no

That is not a fair description to Java or the team that has created it. Do you actually think that James Gosling, Guy Steele, Brian Goetz, Doug Lea, etc. are not aware of nullability? Java was an early 90s attempt to get C and C++ programmers to write safer code with the technology of the day. The design goal of the language was to get half way to LISP or ML for those C and C++ programmers. In an alternate universe where they had just made Common LISP, does it succeed? Perhaps not. Also consider that Java is a cross platform language, that must be backwards compatible, and work the same via a vm across architectures and operating systems, and basic things like just make variables non-nullable by default are not as simple.