On 2013-11-16 05:04:20 +0000, Jonathan M Davis said:
I really don't understand this. Optional<T> is one of the most useless ideas that I've ever seen in Java. Just use null.
Optional specifies explicitly that value can be absent and forces client to check before using the value. Also, if Optional implements monadic interface one can easily chain computations depending on the state of optional values.
Even if references are nullable by default users do not check them for null on every usage. NullPointerException and the like are almost always indicators of programming error.
Null is just horrible.
