statement unless condition is a wonderful bit of syntactic sugar. It reads like natural English if the variable or method it is evaluating is named well.

Yes, sometimes you have to refactor into a traditional if. Sometimes you make the conditional its own method (which you’d end up doing anyway, assuming it didn’t stop at two or three conditions.) These are light tasks as the project grows.

Starting a line with unless, on the other hand, does not work for me. It is also awkward in short English sentences. And long English sentences, where beginning with unless is more appropriate, don’t have analogies in single-line ruby statements.