That relies on a programmer doing the right thing and knowing when to use the escape valve. From the codebases I've seen, I don't trust humans in doing the right thing and being judicious with this. But it's a good point, knowing when to deviate from a pattern is a strong plus.
> I don't trust humans in doing the right thing and being judicious with this.
Language-level safety only protect against trivial mistakes like dereferencing a null-pointer. No language can protect against logical errors. If you have untrusted people comitting unvetted code, you will have much worse problems.
That's why code reviews exist, it's good process to make code reviews mandatory.
It's too much of a stretch to call null an escape hatch, or to pretend that code reviews will somehow strip it out.
The OpenJDK HashMap returns null from get(), put() and remove(), among others. Is this just because it hasn't been reviewed enough yet?
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