[Timon3]

It's much nicer, especially since it keeps the complexity down.

If you nest if/else, you'll quickly approach a point where you have to keep a complex logic tree in your head to determine which states the system could be in inside of any given branch. If you use guard clauses and return early, you'll keep this complexity down to a minimum, since the list of possible states changes linearly with your code instead of exponentially.

I know not everybody likes it, but I think this makes cyclomatic complexity an extremely valuable metric for measuring "ease-of-reading".