Naive, absolutist positions in areas of long-standing consensus between programmers of great experience and the highest imaginable competence makes one look even more ridiculous.

By and large, the best programmers eschew nesting in favor of early returns. Invariably (in my experience) those who argue against early returns are inferior programmers (and not only by virtue of lacking taste in this particular debate).

Where did you get that idea of consensus? A lot of languages do not even have a return statement, neither does lambda calculus. Furthermore, CS community has long abandoned statement based languages in favor of expressions and relations which do not feature "return" for onvious reasons in forms other than equalent to jump.

I'm talking about programmers, not computer scientists. That is, people who actually accomplish things in the real world by hacking on software, rather than pontificating about it from their monadic ivory towers :) The latter have "abandoned statement-based languages," but the former absolutely have not.

I don't see that distinction. The are languages designed to map directly to register machines internal operation, like C or C++ or fortran and those are statement based because that's how the machine works. There are also high level languages, designed to express computation, and those are expression based, again, beacause computation is inherently based on expessions. There are other kinds of languages as well, for other purposes (relations, queries, etc).

Do you really belive that only people working on low level register transfer level things "accomplish things"? That's souds like a very old assembler argument.:-)