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I’ve seen an explosion of silly bang methods that don’t follow Ruby’s usage, and I’ve been meaning to write exactly this post:

In Ruby, you can write methods whose names end in ! (exclamation point or “bang”). There’s a lot of confusion surrounding the matter of when, and why, you would want to do so.

The ! in method names that end with ! means, “This method is dangerous”—or, more precisely, this method is the “dangerous” version of an otherwise equivalent method, with the same name minus the !. “Danger” is relative; the ! doesn’t mean anything at all unless the method name it’s in corresponds to a similar but bang-less method name.

—Bang methods; or, Danger, Will Rubyist! via DABlog