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I don't, and I'd be really grateful if anyone would enlighten me on the matter. Please excuse my ignorance!

If you forget to type a 2nd '=', putting a constant as the left-hand-side will allow the runtime to error instead of treating the expression like an accidental assignment with potentially disastrous side-effects.

In some languages sometimes but in general I think that's the use case for yoda code.

it goes back further than this..

in compiled languages it is a compile time error. So you don't run through 1/2 of your application before you run into it. Instead it shows up as soon as you run make/gcc/g++/etc.

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