It does. Especially considering the fact that RSpec itself was created as a joke solution to the "I wish my tests were more human readable" meme several years ago. Hopefully that sheds some light on why some of us might be hyper-sensitive about it.
I created RSpec (in early 2005) to draw people's attention away from the word "test" because it was a huge hangup while I was teaching TDD. I kept hearing "You can't test something that doesn't exist, therefore your entire idea is bunk." I wanted to introduce TDD to people without ever using the word "test", and then switch them to using xUnit instead.
Not a joke, but I guess you could reasonably describe RSpec as a tool for performing a good old fashioned bait and switch. In a classroom. (I never intended for it to be used outside of a classroom setting.)
Around the time I was looking for ways to "teach TDD without using the word", Aslak Hellesøy introduced me to Dan North's ideas of Behaviour Driven Development. That's where the word "should" came from. I don't know if it was actually Aslak or Dan (or possibly even Liz Keogh) that first used the word "should", but that wasn't my idea.
Also, I'll point out that mixing #should onto Object wasn't my fault. The original syntax looked very close to the expect().to() syntax of today. It was actually assert(foo).does_equal(bar) at one point, and this was the syntax I was most fond of. I tried dozens of different combinations. "#should" was one of many, and I didn't like it. It got released this way because I was talked into it after that variant was demonstrated (by someone else) to a positive audience.
People liked it. RSpec took off. Whoops.
I later said on twitter, jokingly, that RSpec was a huge troll. That was kind of a joke on a joke. RSpec wasn't a joke, but I didn't build it for actual use. That was a happy accident. That said, it's a great tool these days, if a bit heavy. And it has certainly served my original wish of teaching many people TDD very well.
My $0.02 on the "maybe" syntax: if you need this, I suspect your problems are a lot larger than whether or not an assertion will pass or fail. It's symptom solving.
Thank you for this. It's nice to have it straight from the horses mouth instead of the many different types of RSpec folklore I've heard about its origin.
