Proficient programmers who are adept in a variety of paradigms and languages recognize Design Patterns as missing language features. A new revelation dawned on me today – a Design Pattern could be devised to work around a wily language feature as well! I came to this realization after reading about the Null Object pattern. An entire section of the book Object-Oriented Reengineering Patterns is dedicated to this topic, underlining the fact that the more patterns you have in your code, the less expressive and ill-designed the language you are using. Sometime back I wrote an article on why NULL should be removed from languages. If I had known about the Null Object pattern then I would’ve saved some time by not writing this article, as the existence of this pattern itself is a more convincing argument against the case of NULL.