A lot of Ruby idiomatic methods will return either a value or nil, which is falsey, so things like:

  x = meep
  if x
    # do stuff
  end

will run as most might mean.

  > I guess you mean the opposite hasn't
  > prevented Ruby from being popular.

I was stating something more like "the fact that there is a hard split between numbers and booleans, and everything -- barring null -- by default evaluates to true." Since everything is a object instance in Ruby, asserting a variable is basically only evaluating whether or not it is null.

null or false, actually.

Slip of the tongue. ;) But the easiest way to think about it is something like:

  type(x) == Boolean ? x == True : x != nil

Disclaimer: That may not be valid Ruby, as I only have a passing knowledge of some bits of Ruby.