From page 19:<p>&gt; But all those other languages include explicit support for null pointers for a good reason: they’re extremely useful. [....] The problem with null pointers is that it’s easy to forget to check for them.<p>There is no inherent reason for that; just that mainstream languages which support `null` haven&#x27;t been checking `null` usage. Some of the recent ones do. For example, Kotlin has non-nullable types by default, and null types have to be explicitly marked and checked for null-ness.<p>Even for Java, null analysis is built into Eclipse with the help of annotations. Though, ofcourse, it would be far nicer to have it baked into the language.