As the sibling comment says, the post's advice is really about making your code refactoring-friendly with regard to type checking. You generally would not want

As the sibling comment says, the post's advice is really about making your code refactoring-friendly with regard to type checking. You generally would not want to call '.get()' without an 'isPresent()' check because it will throw a NoSuchElementException if the Optional is empty. This is a foreseeable case, so most would like to handle it somewhat explicitly. Today, it is idiomatic to use '.map' to transform it: Optional<String> foo = optionalCountry.map(Country::getName); You can also throw a domain-specific exception from that point: Optional<String> foo = optionalCountry .map(Country::getName) .orElseThrow(...);