[sethrin]

Most often I do

  var_that_might_be_nil.presence || default

reads better imo

[vidarh]

"presence" isn't Ruby, but Rails/ActiveSupport and your example acts very differently in the case of empty strings, empty arrays, hashes etc..

[sethrin]

yes, and?

[vidarh]

So it's often a) not available, b) semantically not an alternative.

In particular it very specifically does not return the default only when the object is nil, and I have plenty of code where people thinking they're the same would cause serious breakage.