> This is exacerbated by ruby's tendencies towards "fluent" interfaces, which is actually code for lots of methods that take undocumented hashes of arguments --- and hash access with strings and symbols? nightmare fuel.

Keyword arguments and pattern matching have improved this quite a bit, but not everybody is using it yet. I'm not sure how much Rails is using it either, which doesn't help.

It's def a dicey situation, but improving.