cyberferret explicitly said it's a good idea to avoid shorthand methods because new programmers don't understand them, and you're making the argument that they're OK because experienced programmers will understand them. The essence of your argument is that if you've used the language enough to know what the or-equals statement means then you'll know what it means. I'm not convinced that's a good reason.

Working on emulation software I commonly run across snippets such as `res = !!iRegisterVal` which results in some C newbies scratching their heads as to why a useless double negation would be there. But for more seasoned developers its intent can pretty easily recognized...

For example,

    def user_signed_in?
      !!current_user
    end

[0] https://gist.github.com/jfarmer/2647362

So rather than write `foo ? TRUE : FALSE` or being more explicit `(foo != 0) ? 1 : 0`, you can just do `!!foo`.

    foo = 1 if foo.nil?

    my_fancy_named_variable = my_array.map{|x| do_processing(x)}.sort_by{|x| x.value} unless some_very_long_conditional_that_breaks_readability