[megawatthours]

I never got the Java argument. I would much rather fail early and noisily with an NPE than return false and let my program happily chug along when it wasn't expecting a null. If the value is intended to be nullable, I would use an optional.

[brianwawok]

Well for 95% of Java's live, there was no such thing as Optional.

So say untrusted user input.. many cases where it could be something or null. Yoda checking it was a nice way to save a null check.

[xxs]

Java8 optional is way slower (write a tree alike struct with optional for left/right/parent) and null checks are one of the free ones. (Hardware optimized)