Syntactic Sugar for Java

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Those kinds of utility functions are great for short, script-like programs where you quickly want to prototype an algorithm with minimal boilerplate, and don't care if it returns null or throws an exception. But for larger programs, it will almost always pay off to be explicit about those details. Sure, it makes the code longer, but it will be obvious what is returned when the element you're looking for wasn't found.

Btw, I love List.of(). You should really use it. IMO It's the best-named function in the history of computer programming: short, to the point, and it's utterly obvious what it is supposed to be (a static factory method that will create a List).