You should try to do this, whenever it is appropriate. Besides serving to warn you when you “accidentally” try to modify a value, it provides information to the compiler that can lead to better optimization of the class file. This is one of the points in the book, “Hardcore Java” by Robert Simmons, Jr. In fact, the book spends all of its second chapter on the use of final to promote optimizations and prevent logic errors. Static analysis tools such as PMD and the built-in SA of Eclipse flag these sorts of cases for this reason.