&gt; which would only be useful if the method was void-returning or returned the this-instance<p>Simply untrue, there are plenty of times methods have side-effects that return something other than void or itself, e.g:<p><pre><code>  - Incrementing a value and returning the current value
  - Inserting or Updating rows and returning the number of rows affected
  - Setting an entry and returning whether there was an existing entry or not</code></pre>