I've been using something similar for some time now, and I must say it's the best thing I've come up with ever. Totally boost the productivity. Most of the time I use it to get stuff from the readline history. See http://gist.github.com/112129
Since I'm working almost exclusively with Rails I find myself do this kind of check mainly in controllers and views. In controllers it's mainly to check nested params and in views whether to output something if there's something to output. The latter is the most annoying case, and yes, it does smell.
Maybe the solution is to add a presentation layer that take care of this conditional nil check?
avdi In Rails, if I have something that may or may not be displayed I like to wrap that in a helper rather than put a conditional in the view.
But Rails views are smelly in general, because as the least-OO part of Rails they are the hardest part to apply conventional OO patterns and idioms to.
"Streetwear today" usually full of bullshit. Scene fapping of itself, heads dug too dead in each others asses (collab x vs x all-over facial cum if you blow me i blow you) that they going nowhere. "Street wear" is dead.
But Rails views are smelly in general, because as the least-OO part of Rails they are the hardest part to apply conventional OO patterns and idioms to.