It's so sad that Java 8 had the chance to really fix the null problem, but gave us only the half-assed `java.util.Optional`. Rather than implementing optional values at the language level, it's just another class tossed into the JRE.

This is perfectly legal code, where the optional wrapper itself is null:

    Optional getMiddleName() {
        return null;
    }

Don't people use @NonNull everywhere now? It's been a few years since I've programmed in Java but even then I feel like that was common practice.

Yes, it's always been possible to check for nulls at runtime.

Personally I use notNull(..) over @NonNull since it actually fires when you expect it to (as opposed to whether your framework dispatcher interceptor trigger decided to invoke it)

isn't @NonNull just a syntactic sugar for adding checkNonNull() call as first statement to the function declaration in compile time, or am I mistaken? Just like lombok, it is supposed to generate code that checks null arguments, from what I know.

I tried:

    @Test
    public void foo() {
        bar(null);
    }

    void bar(@NonNull String param) {
        System.out.println(param);
    }

    import lombok.NonNull;
    import javax.validation.constraints.NotNull;
    import io.micronaut.core.annotation.NonNull;
    import org.springframework.lang.NonNull;
    import reactor.util.annotation.NonNull;