Reading code is more important than writing it, but I'm not convinced that two ways to phrase the same conditional assignment is a bad thing. Or, rather, it might not be a bad thing that there are two ways to phrase the same conditional assignment.

See what I did there? Same meaning, different order of clauses. Emphasis ended up on different parts of the sentence! This is a very powerful out-of-band signaling path to control how the reader interprets the literal words, and being used to Perl where we also have it, it is weird to not have it in other languages.

Sometimes the actual predicate is the important/interesting bit, in which case putting it first makes sense: `if (user_is_underaged) return;`. Sometimes the predicate is not as interesting as the expression it's conditioning: `say "message" if debug_mode;`.