I don't advocate a completely if-less style, but I do often grep and count ifs and elses in a code base before digging in, just to get a sense of what sort of d

I don't advocate a completely if-less style, but I do often grep and count ifs and elses in a code base before digging in, just to get a sense of what sort of developers have been there. I think the if-less style is great kata material. You learn a lot when you apply it on a toy project rather than a real one. Sometimes you need to overdo things in order to understand what their limitations are.