I've been using Swift for over a year now, which has had an Optional implementation from day one. I see a lot of people defending Java's implementation in this thread, can someone check my understanding? I did Java in a past life but am not super familiar with Java 8.
In Swift, types are non-optional by default. You can never end up with a null, the compiler makes it impossible. Optionals are out of the way until you need them, and if you use them properly (i.e. avoid the .get() equivalent), it's still impossible to crash from a null.
In Java 8, things can still contain null by default and you might not know about it, right? You can express that something is Optional in your API, but that's only marginally better than documentation, doesn't solve "unexpected nulls" whatsoever, and makes this only halfway to a solution and therefore broken entirely. Why not just use annotations?
I don't think anyone thinks that Optional as it is in Java right now is the perfect solution. The article seems to be making the case that Optional isn't an improvement of what came before, which is what people are having issues with.
In Swift, types are non-optional by default. You can never end up with a null, the compiler makes it impossible. Optionals are out of the way until you need them, and if you use them properly (i.e. avoid the .get() equivalent), it's still impossible to crash from a null.
In Java 8, things can still contain null by default and you might not know about it, right? You can express that something is Optional in your API, but that's only marginally better than documentation, doesn't solve "unexpected nulls" whatsoever, and makes this only halfway to a solution and therefore broken entirely. Why not just use annotations?
Are my assumptions and understanding correct?