I think the heavy emphasis on auto-loading was a mistake, that someone writing a new framework would be wise to learn from and not repeat.
The reloading in dev mode is HUGELY convenient, I have to admit so I have trouble calling it a mistake -- but is also a huge mess when it fails, and does not work under multi-threaded request dispatch. That latter will, I think, become an increasing problem as more people use multi-threaded request dispatch in Rails -- Rails4 has multi-threaded request dispatch on by defualt in production mode. But I think not in development mode, precisely because of the code-reloading problem. But I'm not sure diverging the dev and production environments (violating 12-factor, incidentally) is a good sustainable solution.
Like you, I find it very hard to rubbish the auto-reloading, but even this encourages bad habits, I think. Rather than write tests for the behaviour we just implemented, or the bug we just fixed, we hit F5. Didn't work? Change something, hit F5. This at least isn't really Rails' fault; it's our job as programmers to do the professional thing. But it does act as something of a siren call to the rocks of cowboy programming. And like you say, there are other, more insidious issues with divergent dev/production environments.
The idea that Rails was designed to be accessible to newcomers seems to be pervasive but I don't think that has every been a top priority for the project. The framework is described as "optimized for programmer happiness and sustainable productivity". It's great if this also leads to a design which is approachable for newcomers but I think it is a mistake to judge features as if that was the intent.
Also, the class reloading is done through ActionDispatch::Reloader. Those are middlewares (There's 3 of them by default IIRC).
I wrote about how it works and how you can use that to customize some of your code inside the app/ folder.
Shameless plug: http://pothibo.com/2013/07/namespace-stuff-in-your-app-folde...
Are you sure about that? To me it seems that if you pass a path to autoload, it does work like ruby STL https://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/activesupport/lib...
I think the same can be said of any abstraction. The Ruby programming language as an abstraction over C. C as an abstraction over assembler. etc. Yet few people write code in assembler. I don't find this a very compelling argument.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...
