> 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 t

> 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.