Railroad lines are, at any given moment, unidirectional. You can’t veer off the track that has been laid out in front of you, and you can’t make unscheduled stops unless you want the overnight express to run into you. These can be problems if you’re not altogether happy with the direction the track is taking you. Equally so if you would like to make any additional visits alongside the plotted course.

On the other hand, if you just keep your limbs inside the vehicle as advised, you can safely traverse the track at a very high velocity to arrive at your destination faster than with any other means of surface transport. You can watch the boring, mundane wasteland outside go by without needing to interact with it in any way.

So, riding the metaphor for all it is worth, when David Heinemeier Hansson took Ruby and created an opinionated, high-productivity web development framework, is it any surprise he named it Ruby on Rails? The name lays out the deal up front: our way, or the highway.

Could he possibly have been any more explicit? As I’m sure most readers know, DHH is anything but subtle. Yet people seem to keep missing the point.