[talaketu]

Unless "name" is unique, there could be multiple matches. Asking for the "first" demands an ordering.

Perhaps (a) the user doesn't care what ordering is used, and/or (b) (such as in your example in the preceding post) hasn't specified an order (and apparently PK ordering is defaulted to PK - a model option?). It would be error-prone for ORM to take (b) as implying (a).

[pat_shaughnessy]

Yes, good point. Rails has a lot of conventions like this - that "first" implies ordering by primary key (by default). I just imagine that most Rails developers don't think about sorting and its implications when they ask for the first record.