The “if” statement is such a fundamental construct in our programming and scripting experience.

It’s not uncommon to see something like 

where the code starts to look like arrows pointing to the right.  And this isn’t the worst thing I’ve written!

Stop the madness!

This is a great indicator of a problem or somewhere we can clean up our code (also known as a code smell).

We really don’t want to get more than one or two levels deep in flow control (I’m including switch, while, do/while, foreach, and for loops here), otherwise it can start getting hard to track what is going on.

It’d be better to extract a function to wrap the conditional and leave an expressive name to describe what is happening.

Doesn’t this read a bit better?