I've responded on reddit but here's my take: He t...

# language-proposals

[kirillrakhman]

I've responded on reddit but here's my take:

He talks about how in "very" staticly typed languages changing one line of code requires you to change a lot of other lines of code. Isn't that a harsh overgeneralization? Sure, if you pass Foo through your program and suddenly null is a valid value, you need to change many (all) instances of Foo to Foo? But the same isn't true for closed-by-default classes/members. If I need to override a method that is now closed, I need to change one or two lines (which the IDE can do for me).

On the other hand, you could make the same argument against any language with a Java-like type system where instead of a List, you need to pass a Collection through your program. It requires exactly the same number of modified lines as the null example.