[MichaelNolan]

> The real problem with Java in particular is you'd end up chaining calls ... and have no idea from the error or the logs what was broken from: a.b.c.d();

That’s been solved since Java 14. (5 years ago) Now the error will tell you exactly what was null.

And “soon” Java will have built in support for expressing nullability in the type system. Though with existing tools like NullAway it’s already (in my opinion) a solved problem.