Comment by mywittyname

The latter example (without the redundant assignments) is preferred by people who do a lot of line-by-line debugging. While most IDEs allow you to set a breakpoint in the middle of an expression, that's still more complicated and error prone than setting one for a line.

I've been on a team that outlawed method chaining specifically because it was more difficult to debug. Even though I'm more of a method-chainer myself, I have taken to writing unchained code when I am working on a larger team.

  var frobnitzBuilder = Frobnitz.builder();
  frobnitzBuilder.withPixieDust();
  frobnitzBuilder.withMayonnaise();
  frobnitzBuilder.withTarget(worstTweetEver);
  val frobnitz = frobnitzBuilder.build();

...is undeniably easier to step-through debug than the chained version.