"Never use early exits" is exceedingly bad advice, in my experience. What has led up to your claim that early exits are bad? As I've gained experience, I find

"Never use early exits" is exceedingly bad advice, in my experience. What has led up to your claim that early exits are bad? As I've gained experience, I find myself writing code like this more and more: if (UnexpectedOrUnhandledCondition(x)) { ... return false; } if (OtherError(y)) { return false; } and so on. Serial code like that is trivially easy to understand when reading; more importantly, six months later, it's far more explicit and easier to comprehend than the comparable single-exit version. The alternative to early exits is nesting, and nesting is the readability killer. My experience has apparently been just the opposite of yours: that avoiding early exits is a sign of a junior programmer, and returning early whenever possible is a sign of an experienced programmer who knows that understands code maintenance.