From jjg, "It is somewhat surprising, to me, that there is no method on Element or TypeElement to find the enclosed elements with a given simple name. Yes, you can iterate through all the enclosed elements but that imposes an unnecessary extra cost, when the members are sorted by name internally, at least within javac."

Given the frequency of this operation, it is reasonable to have a helper method to take advantage of implementation-specific features, like elements sorted by name.