In Storing and finding roles and elsewhere, it says that one of the places ansible looks for .yml files is ~/.ansible/roles . Why .ansible, which is hidden, and not ansible, which is not hidden? Of course, I can change it easily by changing the ansible.cfg file or setting a value in the envar DEFAULT_MODULE_PATH. That’s not my question. My curiosity is piqued: why did the ansible designers elect to use a hidden directory? They were/are very smart people, so they must have had a good reason, what was it?
It's quite commonplace to do. .bashrc,.ssh, .local, .bin, and many
other local directories are in these kind of subdirectories that can
be written or administered by the user but are typically used for
individual configuration information and are relatively stable.
The main reason is that this directory keeps configuration files. The
justification for having hidden files is that if you don't see them,
you are less likely to damage them.