[bobbytherobot]

newsat13 wasn't complaining about using conventions. newsat13 was complaining about how Rails uses black magic with conventions.

I can't speak to Rails, but I've worked in other codebases that used reflection to dynamically attach different pieces of code together. It was hard to trace code because I couldn't do a search for the value being generated nor could I use the static analysis to find the value. I had to manually trace through the whole stack to find the bit of reflection that was generating a value.

[rhizome]

I've never worked in a codebase like that, but in all my years of helping people with Ruby and Rails I've concluded that reflection is a code smell. It's one of those things that is taught in CS and winds up appearing where conventions might not have been immediately apparent, a fallback to training.