Is today's network more like 'a disparate collection of services that share common referential mechanisms using a common namespace?

In this example, we still want app/models/shapes/circle.rb to define Circle, not Shapes::Circle. This may be your personal preference to keep things simple, and also avoids refactors in existing code bases. The collapsing feature of Zeitwerk allows us to do that:

A namespace is a scope.C++ provides namespaces to prevent name conflicts.

But the other effect of unnamed namespaces is that all identifiers inside an unnamed namespace are treated as if they had internal linkage, which means that the content of an unnamed namespace can’t be seen outside of the file in which the unnamed namespace is defined.

import { knex } from 'knex' // this is a function that you call to instantiate knex import { Knex } from 'knex' // this is a namespace, and a type of a knex object

Because module members are usually used with a namespace, short and simple names are usually the most readable option. But those names might not make sense outside the module they’re defined in, so @forward has the option of adding an extra prefix to all the members it forwards.

Internal Sass features have also moved into the module system, so we have complete control over the global namespace.

the functions named step* are all of single use, they are created only to avoid the “pyramid of doom.” No one is going to reuse them outside of the action chain. So there’s a bit of namespace cluttering

Authors of third-party tools should prefix each label key with the reverse DNS notation of a domain they own, such as com.example.some-label.