[satyanash]

> having positive branching first

This is advice I've never seen or received. It's always been the latter, exit early, etc. Languages like Swift even encode this into a feature, a la if guards.

[Zanfa]

Positive branch first is good advice when both branches are roughly even in terms of complexity. If the negative branch is just a return, I’d bail early instead.

Negative first makes else-branches double negative which reads weird, eg. if !userExists {…} else {…}