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> There is a story that one of the designers of Java was pushing very hard in favour of Java references being non-nullable by default. But Gosling rejected the idea

Is there a source for that? And has Gosling apologized to the world since then? (I mean Hoare apologized, Gosling should grovel and beg for forgiveness)

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I don't have a source and I don't quite remember where I heard it. It's probably not true. Although this post from Lambda the Ultimate mentions a similar sentiment:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1905#comment-23217

It's still a bit weird, I think: a lot of the migration to Java was from enterprise C++, and while C++ has null pointers it doesn't have null references. So that wouldn't have been much of a change.

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