Time to do something about validate & validates?

I think it’s about time we did something about the validate and validates methods in ActiveModel.

Having two methods with such similar names that do similar things but in a totally different way is extremely confusing. What’s more, if you do use validate instead of validates by mistake, no exceptions are raised and MyModel.valid? will return true.

I have trouble remembering which one I should be calling, and I’ve been working with Rails for years now. I can’t imagine how confused a novice programmer would be…

Perhaps renaming validate would be the way to go (with proper deprecation warnings, of course)?

Adapted from a message to the Ruby on Rails: Core mailing list, all constructive discussion should happen there.