The namespace mechanism was only added a few months ago and we're still working out some of the kinks with how it works. The plan going forward is to slice Base into an organized hierarchy but still have everything available by default without too many imports. The "using" keyword works rather similarly to the same keyword in C++ and now in Ruby 2.0 [1], and aims to give the best of both the "single huge namespace" (C, PHP, Matlab) and many small namespaces approaches (Python, Java).

[1] http://blog.headius.com/2012/11/refining-ruby.html