how to bang...like a boss

In the Ruby programming language, there exists two characters you are only permitted to use when naming a method: ? and !. These special permissions are designed to allow you to establish a certain level of convention in your method naming, for example, a method ending in "?" in Ruby is mosty likely always going to return a Boolean response of true or false. Not only is this convention not questioned much, but there seems to be very little sensible use out of making a "?" method not return a boolean response.

Unlike the "?" suffix, which has an established and unchallenged purpose within the Ruby community, "!" is a lot less cut and dry. In ActiveRecord, for example, "!" is added to methods like save() and create() when you want an Exception to be thrown in the case where those methods fail to execute properly. It's easy enough to add the "!" to those methods when you need to change the nature of your business logic, or perhaps you wish to capture the Exception so you can raise a new one overtop of that error case.

# app/models/post.rb
class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_presence_of :title
end

# app/controllers/posts_controller.rb
def create
  model = Model.create! # => throws ActiveRecord::ValidationError
end

def create
  model = Model.create # => just returns 'false'
end

But Ruby, on the other hand, uses "!" to denote when you're mutating the object that you're calling the method on. This is an entirely different use case from Rails, yet this use case also seems to make sense on a syntactic level:

starter = { foo: 'bar' }

newer = starter.merge(baz: 'bat') # => returns a new Hash: { foo: 'bar', baz: 'bat' }

starter.merge!(baz: 'bat') # => merges in { baz: 'bat' } to the starter Hash instance

bang is the yolo convention

At eLocal, we use "!" as a generalized YOLO convention. It means we're about to execute some actions which may fail, or are connecting to an outside resource (such as an API or our mothership site) In either case, the "!" dictates that our app's control flow should stop.