Working towards a rule to distinguish between magic and powerful would be interesting and I for one would like to see some of HN take some swings here. On firs

Working towards a rule to distinguish between magic and powerful would be interesting and I for one would like to see some of HN take some swings here. On first pass I'm having issues imagining a specific function that would be part of a standard library that is sufficiently magic that it warrants avoiding. Learning is just a part of programming. Something that initially seems like magic can quickly becomes one of your favorite hammers and make you more productive (just found reduce-kv the other day, it's awesome). If it's in the standard library then at least being able to use it seems wise. Note I'm not saying one should or could reasonably be demanded to know everything about the standard library, but rather that being asked to know something in it going forward from a point is likely reasonable. Magic tends to live in side-effect heavy libraries and frameworks. Rails is full of magic that can make you very productive for specific tasks, but learning all the magic takes a lot of time and the incantations are not necessarily generalizable so when you switch over to Django or Node you need to go learn new magic, or sometimes the magic your looking for doesn't exist anymore and you need to learn what was actually happening (this happened to me switching from Rails to Django, I forget what in particular but it was somewhat jarring realizing how much I had been taking for granted). Learning something like map will translate even if the literal syntax doesn't, knowing and relying on x-many separate opt-args for defining an ActiveRecord relationship to save explicitly typing a dozen lines might be magic not worth it especially if the whole team has to know. Edit: Just wanted to add that although I took a shot at a rough distinction I want to clarify that I am not suggesting that I have the correct answer, I only hope to elicit the thoughts of better thinkers and posters.