It's a possible smell in Ruby all right. Ideally, every file has its code in classes or modules that match the file name, so require 'foo' brings in the class F

It's a possible smell in Ruby all right. Ideally, every file has its code in classes or modules that match the file name, so require 'foo' brings in the class Foo and nothing else. But it's possible to do some really ugly hacky stuff, so it more becomes please don't actually do that in a large production codebase. Python's default of namespacing imports is nicer all right, though I've seen a decent amount of Python code in the wild that has a dozen import * at the top of every file so that grep is the only way to find out where a function is actually defined, just as bad as Ruby.