This sounds very much like a call to think through one's designs first. (You do design, right?) Laying out the branches on paper is a very good way of doing this.

Of course, there are some gotchas. For example, the place I'm at right now has a lot of legacy code that uses the form

sub foo {
    my $self = shift;

    if (ref $self) {
        # Do stuff
        return $some_useful_value;
    } else {
        # Complain
        return undef;
    }
}
[download]

sub foo {
    my $self = shift;

    unless (ref $self) {
        # Complain
        return undef
    }

    # Do stuff
    return $some_useful_value
}
[download]

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.