Null is bad, it can crash your program. Even its creator called it a billion-dollar mistake hence you should always try to avoid using nulls whenever you can. For example, you should not return a null String when you can return an empty String, similarly never return null collections when you can return an empty collection. I have shared many such tips in my earlier article, 10 tips to avoid NullPointerException and my reader liked that a lot. But, I wrote that article a couple of years ago when Java 8 was not around and there was no Optional, a new way to avoid NullPointerException in Java, but, things have changed now.
