I think the obvious right answer is to not have null in the language, and use an option type instead. There might be a better solution, but I haven't come across one yet.

Of course, it's too late for Java now. They have an Optional<T> type, but removing null from the language would break backwards compatibility. Of course, that means that a method that returns Optional<T> might return an Optional<T>, or null, so now you have 2 things to check instead of one :).