What language sees wide spread use without at least a decade in gestation? Java, ironically, but cutting edge languages take longer than a decade before making it to the blue collar programmer's floor. I mean the number of people that struggle with even stuff like generics still is amazing and that has been around for 17 years at this point so 10 years is nothing.

And java has excellent static analysis, so if you want to you can prevent every single npe.