I'm sorry but this is braindead. I'm sure there are valid use cases but optimize for the most common one: find_by_id accepts a single argument, the ID of the object you want to find.

That is why Python has kwargs. Those two stars stand out like a sore thumb and when you are passing positional arguments in the form of a hash it is pretty apparent.

Ruby does not yet have kwargs, but the upcoming Ruby 2.0 has a form of them.

that would be called .find(id) - accepts a single argument of an id. This is the canonical way to retrieve by id.

find_by_id, find_by_name, etc. aren't really methods, they trigger calls to method_missing which interprets the code to generate SQL. It's a "neat" feature, but one which I've only used once or twice in 6 years of Rails development.