[Mawr]

Of course you can, it's a tiny, isolated example consisting of 5 or so tokens. That's not how real programs look like so you cannot take the example so literally.

The second form is superior for at least three reasons:

1. Enables a property corollary to the happy path rule, which is that every return statement of a function is at the beginning of a line. This property is crucially important for readability, it makes it reliably possible to determine every exit point of a function by merely scanning the left hand vertical slice of it as opposed to needing our eyes to jump around erratically searching for arbitrarily placed returns.

2. Uniformity: mixing different if statement styles in a single codebase interferes with our ability to match visual patterns. Since we can no longer rely on every if statement looking the same, we cannot quickly skim over code anymore.

3. Refactorability: it's easier to add another line of code to the if statement if there's no need to also add brackets.