[irjoe]

You're right, they're not really "early returns" but for me at least they are often in similar fashion to the "early exit" pattern in the article:

    def transform_data(raw_data) when length(raw_data) == 1, do: []
    def transform_data(raw_data) do
        # actual function code goes here
    end

That said, I wouldn't want to see the above snippet in my team's codebase :)

[rrobukef]

Not a fan of prolog then? As an excercise, find the guard in this snippet (https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Babbage_problem#Prolog) and imagine such code in a team codebase!

[irjoe]

Quite the opposite :) My preference would be to rely on pattern matching (unification) in the function head:

    def transform_data([_|[]]) do: []

I just wanted an example of using guard clauses. It does depend on the actual code though, there's probably a more elixiry solution.