Convention over configuration is fine until all you need is a little configuration, at which point it becomes a game of hunting down where the magic comes from

Convention over configuration is fine until all you need is a little configuration, at which point it becomes a game of hunting down where the magic comes from and how to override it, because nobody thought that anybody would need anything other than the conventional approach, and so they didn't document how to configure it, and then your code turns into a bunch of workarounds. I think Backbone is pretty aligned with this philosophy: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/ http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/