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We have a java monorepo of relatively large size and sophistication, driving our entire fintech, and I haven't seen a NPE for years. Use NullAway and it basica

We have a java monorepo of relatively large size and sophistication, driving our entire fintech, and I haven't seen a NPE for years. Use NullAway and it basically makes the problem go away. Our application won't build if it detects a potential NPE.

unscaled 17d ago
Congratulations. You've added another build tool and sprinkled your code with ugly annotations and ifs and Optional Optional.of(x).map(y) all over the place to get the same thing you'd get by moving to Kotlin. I get it why this seems like a less drastic change, but this saddens me. Kotlin solves more issues with the type system (smart casts, reified types, immutability by default), without sacrificing readability. Unless I can see a solution in Java that makes dealing with NPEs as easier for lazy developers as ignoring them, I don't consider it a solved issue.
- smrtinsert 17d ago
  More Java strawman arguments. How do we live with BuilderFactoryFactoryBuilders! Every day we cry ourselves to sleep!
- munksbeer 17d ago
  I don't really think about it too much, it works fine. We don't use Optionals, I'm not sure why you brought that up. I'm not a dogmatic person in this respect, rather pragmatic. I'm sure Kotlin is great, and I'd enjoy writing it, but for now, the vast majority of the finance world runs on Java, so it's what we use. I find it easy to work with, which counts for a lot.
- samus 17d ago
  > Congratulations. You've added another build tool and sprinkled your code with ugly annotations and ifs and Optional Optional.of(x).map(y) all over the place to get the same thing you'd get by moving to Kotlin. You deserve the strawman award of the year. NullAway and JSpecify encourage making as many types non-nullable as possible, thus they can actually also advice about removing redundant null checks. Nullable types become the painful exception that visibly spreads through the codebase, which discourages writing code that relies on null. Optional doesn't enter the picture at all. NullAway kills their usecase within ones own code. They are anyway only recommend as return types to force others to check for an emoty case, but I think Optional will become fully optional when the Java platform gets nullable types on its own. Google Error Prone is a code linting tool that's very useful in its own right, and NullAway is just another plugin.

unscaled 17d ago

Congratulations. You've added another build tool and sprinkled your code with ugly annotations and ifs and Optional Optional.of(x).map(y) all over the place to get the same thing you'd get by moving to Kotlin. I get it why this seems like a less drastic change, but this saddens me. Kotlin solves more issues with the type system (smart casts, reified types, immutability by default), without sacrificing readability. Unless I can see a solution in Java that makes dealing with NPEs as easier for lazy developers as ignoring them, I don't consider it a solved issue.

smrtinsert 17d ago
More Java strawman arguments. How do we live with BuilderFactoryFactoryBuilders! Every day we cry ourselves to sleep!
munksbeer 17d ago
I don't really think about it too much, it works fine. We don't use Optionals, I'm not sure why you brought that up. I'm not a dogmatic person in this respect, rather pragmatic. I'm sure Kotlin is great, and I'd enjoy writing it, but for now, the vast majority of the finance world runs on Java, so it's what we use. I find it easy to work with, which counts for a lot.
samus 17d ago
> Congratulations. You've added another build tool and sprinkled your code with ugly annotations and ifs and Optional Optional.of(x).map(y) all over the place to get the same thing you'd get by moving to Kotlin. You deserve the strawman award of the year. NullAway and JSpecify encourage making as many types non-nullable as possible, thus they can actually also advice about removing redundant null checks. Nullable types become the painful exception that visibly spreads through the codebase, which discourages writing code that relies on null. Optional doesn't enter the picture at all. NullAway kills their usecase within ones own code. They are anyway only recommend as return types to force others to check for an emoty case, but I think Optional will become fully optional when the Java platform gets nullable types on its own. Google Error Prone is a code linting tool that's very useful in its own right, and NullAway is just another plugin.