Is unless in Ruby really a shortcut?

I'm have mixed feelings about unless in Ruby. It's not I don't like it but sometimes I find it suboptimal. I feel that in some cases if !condition is much easier to process.

I'm not a native English speaker, although I've been using English for most of my life and I've been coding for almost the same amount of time each time I see unless I need to make an effort to process it.

It's not that I need to stop and think about it, but I feel the difference between unless and if not.

So we had this discussion about unless in our team recently and it looks like I'm not the only one.

Out of curiosity we decided to ran a simple survey in the company and see what's the general feeling about unless.

16 people shared their experience out of which only 2 people were native speakers. You can guess already that for those two unless is as easy to comprehend as if. For the rest is basically 50/50.

Whenever you see unless in code you:

Excluding those two native speakers, would be 6, 1, 7. Charts bellow have them excluded.

By years of using Ruby

Up to a year

Up to three years

More than three years

Summary

The last chart for me is the most interesting. It may show that for my group unless comprehension didn't improve with the years of experience. Not sure what the reasons are.

I ran this survey out of curiosity, it was fun to watch results but they don't prove anything.

Don't think I'm saying you should drop unless. I'm still using it but maybe it's not worth to enforce it as there are cases when if not might be actually better? Dunno, up to you. We haven't decided on anything yet.

How do you feel about unless? Want to take part in the survey?