I found this article by Chip Bennet to be interesting; it is about the difference between a theme’s template files for home pages and front pages. There is a difference, of course, and I like his proposed changes to the nomenclature throughout.
http://www.chipbennett.net/2013/09/14/home-page-and-front-page-and-templates-oh-my/
A quote:
Blog Posts Index
Use home.php.
Simple, right? But what about a custom page template, such as template-blog.php? Can’t a Theme also use that? Not to put too fine a point on it, but: no. That would be _doing_it_wrong().
I found the article from Post Status, a blog I recently found which has a great roundup of interesting WordPress news and not so annoying as others.