you could take a look at what Rust is doing with the Option enum. Superficially it looks similar to using null, but it actually accomplishes something very different.

A function that classically would return a value, say an int, but sometimes returns null instead, becomes a function that returns an Option. This forces explicit handling of the two cases, namely Some(value) or None. This way, it is next to impossible to try to do an operation on a value that does not exist.