> Is this just acceptable now? That’s a matter of opinion, and my opinion is hell yes that’s not only acceptable but recommended! If creating a variable makes

> Is this just acceptable now? That’s a matter of opinion, and my opinion is hell yes that’s not only acceptable but recommended! If creating a variable makes the code more readable, then do it; if it doesn’t, then don’t. But certainly don’t worry about NPEs. A similar piece of advice is that you shouldn’t do this: if (a.equals("hello")) You should instead, the advice goes, do this: if ("hello".equals(a)) because this doesn’t throw an NPE if `a` happens to be null. The only problem is that you want to be aware that your value is null; you don’t want to hide the error, then wonder why your program blows up further down the call stack. You haven’t solved the problem. You haven’t fixed a bug. All you’ve done is make that particular error message go away. It turns out that the real advice is not “structure your code to avoid NullPointerExceptions”, but “avoid null”. With this in mind, rules like this one, as well as guidelines telling you not to have too many function calls on the same line, are rendered useless.