I like that type of code, so yes, maybe it's a darling. It's easy to make it more readable by aligning the code with the dots, so that it becomes a pipeline:

I like that type of code, so yes, maybe it's a darling. It's easy to make it more readable by aligning the code with the dots, so that it becomes a pipeline: @sentence = @sentence.split(' ') .map!{|x| x = x[0..0].upcase << x[1..-1]} .join(' ') I definitely prefer that to half a screen page of crappy imperative code, where people over time will add lots of side effects etc. Besides, the middle part is clearly a strawman because @sentence = @sentence.split(' ') .map!(&:capitalize) .join(' ') but yeah. ;)