groovy helps a bit with this when you use the jvm -- lots of their operators are null aware [1], ie

  max([3, null, 4]) == 4

and they have a null-safe dereference operator [2], so returning null is actually reasonable as an error

  def user = User.find( "admin" )           //this might be   null if 'admin' does not exist
  def streetName = user?.address?.street

Collapsable to:

  def streetName = User.find("admin").?address.?street

It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than plain java. Compare to:

  String street = null;
  User user = User.find("admin");
  if (user != null) {
    Address addr = user.address;
    if (addr != null)
      street = addr.street;
  }

  // or even
  String street = null;
  if (User.find("admin") != null && User.find("admin").address != null)
    street = User.find("admin").address;

    

I think one of my biggest complaints -- and the reason I think Gosling is a moron -- is how programmer unfriendly java is. Some syntactical sugar as above, so you don't have to nest null checks, goes a long way towards making languages more friendly to devs. Even simple things like in ruby being able to say

  1_000_300_233 == 1000300233

makes it a lot nicer to read big numbers. Sigh. If Gosling actually wrote code instead of doing whatever he wastes his time doing, you'd think that's the sort of thing you could just add to the language.

[1] http://groovy.codehaus.org/Null+Object+Pattern

[2] http://groovy.codehaus.org/Operators#Operators-SafeNavigatio...