Nice. But it does highlight a trend in modern programming languages such as Ruby etc. where these one line shorthand methods are used to such an extent these days that new programmers to the project have to spend an inordinate amount of time reverse engineering some of these shortcuts to make sense of program flow and understand the program in their heads.<p>Take the simple, quick initialiser:<p><pre><code> foo ||= 1
</code></pre>
Instead of the more verbose<p><pre><code> if foo.nil?
foo = 1
end
</code></pre>
Undoubtedly, the first line is a much cooler version, but like skinny jeans was once cool - getting in and out of them far outweighed the cool factor.