[hnfong]

That’s kind of what the GP meant…

A require in ruby would just import whatever those files defined in the global space. They may be “modules” (which probably have different meaning in ruby vs Python), but they’re globals nonetheless and inventive coders put all sorts of weird things into the global space instead of following convention of one file one module.

It’s a fundamental philosophical difference between the two languages - is it a good thing to let programmers do the wrong thing? Python makes it hard to do so, Ruby celebrates the flexibility.