Avoid Else, Return Early (2013)
Programmers with lots of hours of maintaining code eventually evolve to return early, sorting exit conditions at top and meat of the methods at the bottom.Same way you evolve out of one liners.Same way comments are extra weight that should only be in public or algorithm/need to know areas.Same way braces go on the end of the method/class name to reduce LOC.Same way you move on from heavy OO to dicts/lists.Same way you go more composition instead of inheritance.Same way while/do/while usually fades away, and if needed exit conditions.Same way you move on from single condition bracket-less ifs. (debatable but more merge friendly and OP hasn't yet)Same way you get joy deleting large swaths of code.and many others on and on.Usually these come from hours of writing/maintaining code and styles that lead to bugs.