Love it!! As a Java 7 developer transitioning to Streams this made no sense to me and ended up doing the optional.isPresent() -&gt; optional.get() ...<p>Took me to learn a pure functional language (Scala) to come back and start using map, filter, etc ... Not because Java 8 doesn&#x27;t support it, but because a functional language community just has that mindset. There are many Java 8 developers using streams() and optionals with an imperative programming mindset still.