Explicit programming is more readable, but can result in a lot of boilerplate. "Magical" programming is much more intuitive once you know where the magic comes

Explicit programming is more readable, but can result in a lot of boilerplate. "Magical" programming is much more intuitive once you know where the magic comes from but can be maddening to debug. Any framework large enough to be useful starts abstracting away implementation details. I've found that people that gravitate towards Ruby enjoy meta-programming. The running joke is that you're not a Ruby programmer until you've decided that you should write a DSL. Like everything, clever programming has its tradeoffs. These days no one reads the source code of every method they call until something is not working the way they expected it to. Personally, I find the JS ecosystem that absolute worst for this because of the amount of imported code to layer basic functionality on top of the standard library. If you've worked with rails long enough - well at that point things like Devise are probably in your mental model of how they work. Personally I still find the large unbridgeable chasm between Python 2 and 3 to be a large friction point in the ecosystem. But if I worked in Python a smuch as I worked in Ruby, I may find Ruby more troublesome. The simple fact is all languages are getting better. The best tool is not always the one that would be best for the job, sometimes it's just the one you know best. And the tradeoffs we make for ease of programming and abstraction can then turn around and mean we are pushing megabytes of JS over the wire when we don't need to, and now we are trying to solve that with more explicit inclusion and automatic tree-shaking in build pipelines etc. It's all good. Every tool has two edges. I'm much happier to see people continue to engage with this edges are figure out how to make them more effective than to always argue about which edge is sharper.