Phoenix is popular partly because people like its API and its convenience macros. It won out over Jose's own framework, Dynamo which he scrapped in favor of bec

Phoenix is popular partly because people like its API and its convenience macros. It won out over Jose's own framework, Dynamo which he scrapped in favor of becoming a core contributor to Phoenix. Its easy to make yourself sound wise by complaining about macros, but this largely boils down to personal preferences, and a lot of people have different ones from you. For most of the people who actually use Phoenix, the DSL makes intuitive sense and so there isn't much learning curve, and it is such an important library to applications that use it that its worth taking the time to really learn it, whereas it might not be the case for other libraries that are macro heavy. Most libraries don't go that route though.