I don't think you should be downvoted for this view, but my experience has been pretty good with streams; they took a little getting used to, but now I find the

I don't think you should be downvoted for this view, but my experience has been pretty good with streams; they took a little getting used to, but now I find they're generally a LOT more robust than the handcrafted stuff. Off-by-ones and NPEs are fairly hard to achieve, and if well done the semantics can be a lot clearer. A lot of enterprise code IS basically plumbing after all! Where it goes wrong IMO is where a mix of styles and too many inline lambdas splatter a mess of logic into some god-method. As other comments note, good formatting will help with intelligibility of failures - and IMO sensible logging (at least of error paths) makes it all rather noce to debug.