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This article is like a fiction the "Java Land". To the Java language designers, it would be like a space-age concept.

Sadly, that's not true. They do know lisp which has much better ways of dealing with nil. Lisp methods can even declare a nil handler function. Other languages allow defining special functions to handle null, it's not rocket science, but it would complicate java a lot to fix it now.

> They do know lisp which has much better ways of dealing with nil.

Lisp being mostly a class of dynamically-typed languages, their solution to the issue doesn't really apply to Java. For statically typed languages, the solution adopted by the ML family (as well as haskell) is far superior: encode the notion of "optional" values in an abstract type.

Nope. Java was strongly influenced by languages where this was already a solved problem: http://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html

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