String.equals() argument ordering

Question

I recently received a downvote for using the following in a recent answer:

String word = ...;
if (\"s\".equals(word) || \"y\".equals(word)

Answer 1

Well, it depends. If in your program "word" should never be null, word.equals("s") may actually be better. If for some obscure reason "word" will become null, you will get NullPointerException. Think about it. If you get exception, you know something went wrong, and you can faster find mistake and fix it. If program will continue to work silently, and produce wrong results, it will be much harder to detect the problem. Actually, you may not notice there is the problem at all.

It all depends.