this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
17 points (74.3% liked)
Programming
23417 readers
245 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nulls are useful, but you can't work with them in Java. Anything can be null at any time without warning, even when you have absolutely no reason to ever allow a null. Null safety as a language feature gives you the choice to allow nulls when they make sense or guarantee a value when needed. It saves you checking for nulls in the core of your logic when you already ruled them out at the boundary and enforced it at compile time.
If you check for them in your boundary, you shouldn't check for them everywhere, only where you possibly introduce them ...
But you can't look at a method signature and instantly know who handles the null check. You need to inspect code and calls to know for sure. This will lead to paranoia, sooner or later