Acceptable — barely — in dynamically typed languages, but utterly moronic for a strongly typed language where you can make references null-safe statically and at the type level.
Hiding nulls under the carpet is only a recipe for painfully hard to discover bugs in the long run.
This design is type level. Properties and primitives are not null, references used after a guard procedure are not null, other references are Maybe types. Functions are Maybe typed if they are operating on nullable references. Those types are not syntactically top level, but that's because I was considering an alteration, not a rewrite.
Acceptable — barely — in dynamically typed languages, but utterly moronic for a strongly typed language where you can make references null-safe statically and at the type level.
Hiding nulls under the carpet is only a recipe for painfully hard to discover bugs in the long run.