Nice article as someone familiar with sum types but not sum types in Java.
I don't know if sum types alone are enough to get me to like Java, pervasive nullability is still around and even rears its head multiple times in this article.
I don't know if sum types alone are enough to get me to like Java, pervasive nullability is still around and even rears its head multiple times in this article.
I'm really excited about https://jspecify.dev/, which is an effort by Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc to standardize annotations, starting with @Nullable.
Persuading Java devs not to use nulls is hard.
I know Kotlin is basically supposed to be that, it has a lot of other stuff though, and I haven't used it much.
They actually fixed the billion dollar mistake...
I haven't worked with Kotlin in a while, but IIRC their non-nullable references actually do include runtime checks, so you cannot simply assign null to a non-nullable and have it pass at runtime like you can (easily) do in C#.