But we're not talking about advancing language design--we're talking about a small modification to an existing, widely used language whose basics are not going to change. There are a lot of problems with Java I'd like to see fixed before null, and the Java community has dismissed most of those as too radical (like closures).
There are languages which work (mostly) without nulls on the JVM though. Scala does something very similar to Haskell's Maybe. (Although for interoperability with Java it can deal with nulls if you insist.)
There are languages which work (mostly) without nulls on the JVM though. Scala does something very similar to Haskell's Maybe. (Although for interoperability with Java it can deal with nulls if you insist.)