From a testing standpoint the former is often superior. It will also tend to focus your attention on organizing your corner cases better.

But as my peer alludes, there are a lot of people who happily write a lot of functions full of side effects and string them together. And in those hands a great mess can be made. I used to be more tolerant of this sort of code but I’ve heard enough complaints to scrutinize this pattern and it does seem to result in quite a few more errors.