My hot take is that "magic" is just a pejorative term to dismiss any abstraction that someone doesn't like. It's subjective, and IMO it's used mostly as a thoug

My hot take is that "magic" is just a pejorative term to dismiss any abstraction that someone doesn't like. It's subjective, and IMO it's used mostly as a thought-terminating cliche rather than providing any value to a discussion. Sometimes it seems like people throw around the word "magic" like it's some morally dubious shortcut used by programmers who lack the discipline to resist its temptations. I'd argue that making a good language that doesn't require using "magic" is actually _hard_; it needs to differentiate from existing languages enough not to be redundant but still try to fit into the non-uniform expectations of users. Rather than saying that a language "has magic" or "doesn't have magic", I wish it was more common for people to directly state that a language works like they'd expect or point out the areas where it doesn't (which can be separated from a value judgment of whether something is "good" or not). If anything, I think that saying a language works like you expect is _more_ of a compliment than saying "it doesn't have magic" because it properly conveys the sense that our expectations are fairly narrow in comparison to the entire design space and require skill to identify rather than something obvious that people would only avoid by choice.