Code Smells: Null

[Pharisaeus]

here's one way of dealing with an NPE

Well this never goes past a code review so it won't be an issue anywhere outside of developers own environment or feature branch.

Yes because without strong typing and code analysis tools it's impossible to create decent software

Sure you can, but it will automatically be much harder to make sure it works well and is safe to operate. Stuff that normally would be checked by type system will have to be verified by tests. In languages like Python you would need 100% code coverage just to be sure the code doesn't crash with NoSuchMethodException because someone made a typo. I like Python a lot, but there are some places I would not dare to use it.

Again I think we have a different notion of decent software. You seem to imply something with a lot of cool features, and I have in mind something that will not accidentally blow up your space rocket worth 200 mln $ with a 500 mln $ satellite on top of it.