For better or worse, the convention in Ruby is to name methods in a second-person style [0], as if addressing the object directly: “file, do you `#exist?`”; “st

For better or worse, the convention in Ruby is to name methods in a second-person style [0], as if addressing the object directly: “file, do you `#exist?`”; “string, do you `#start_with?` foo?”. So, for consistency, `Dir.exist?` and `File.exist?` have been preferred for a long time. [0] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9041#note-1 https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/9041#note-1