While working on a codebase that has a lot of legacy code I noticed a lot of functions written like this. For some reason, the older devs in the team preferred to write them this way, and much to my annoyance they still do.


        // Not so nice.

        function foo($bar)
        {

            if ($bar > 0) {
                return "YES";
            } else if ($bar == 0) {
                return "MAYBE"
            } else {
                return "NO";
            }
        }


        // Not so nice as well.

        function foo($bar)
        {
            $value = '';            

            if ($bar > 0) {
                $value = "YES";
            } else if ($bar == 0) {
                $value = "MAYBE"
            } else {
                $value = "NO";
            }

            return $value;
        }
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In my opinion, that's too much noise for your brain, we can make it a lot more readable just by utilising early returns.

        // Very much nice, yes, yes, sexy.

        function foo($bar) 
        {
            if ($bar > 0) {
                return "YES";
            }

            if ($bar == 0) {
                return "MAYBE";
            }

            return "NO";    
        }
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Isn't it a lot cleaner now? Don't be a dinosaur, use early returns!