[choward]

Ruby doesn't have real modules. You're right, that they are just namespaces. They are global variables with extra typing.

If you use a third party library, when you require something, you have no idea what "modules" or other values it creates polluting the global namespace. This at least assigns those values to a local variable where they can be accessed and doesn't make them global.

That said, I'm not a fan of ruby and all the workarounds to try to make it like a more sane language that it isn't.