> if I could go back in time and tell them to avoid one thing it would be their strict adherence to naming conventions

Monkey paw curls. Rails probably wouldn’t have reached popularity were it not for the strict adherence to naming conventions. The Rails value prop is productivity and the ethos of “convention over configuration” is what makes that possible.

“Convention over configuration” was coined by DHH himself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_over_configuration Without it, you don’t have Rails.