Today I learned... why Scala usually doesn't use null

We Scala developers use the Option monad because it's so much better to assign None to something instead of null -- it's much safer and more explicit.

And we never have to see another NullPointerException!

Fatal exception:
None.get
java.util.NoSuchElementException: None.get
at scala.None$.get(Option.scala:313)
at scala.None$.get(Option.scala:311)

Now we just have to worry about not trying to call get on an Option that's None.
This is why many people in the Scala community recommend against ever using Option.get.

It's Scala's version of the NullPointerException. But it can be avoided if we use methods like map, filter, fold, foreach, getOrElse, etc., on an Option monad... Or in the Java-style, if we really have to use get, to check if it's empty first.

But sometimes you might want it to throw an exception because it means an assumption has been violated.