For sure you can, but the internals of the libraries can also cause NPEs because of turtles all the way down :P

We've been running scala in production for 4 years, and had our share of NPEs in our code and in the libraries we host. My point I guess was just that it's not entirely true that they will not boil to the surface on occasion.

It's true what you say about libraries and turtles. Still it's rare the event when I get an NPE from my/our code.

Sometimes think I would love to have a layer between us and Java. Some sort of FFI which returned everything on an Option.

Probably too cumbersome, but still ...

Thanks for mentioning this. I had no idea. All this time I had been doing null checks...this makes it so much less painful!