Having been living in the Django world for a while now, I knew what the title was referring to. I disagree with the author, however. I think that magic is a ba

Having been living in the Django world for a while now, I knew what the title was referring to. I disagree with the author, however. I think that magic is a bad thing, but this is really an in-house debate. Django and Zope are on the extreme ends of the spectrum of Magic to non-Magic, and I have worked in both frameworks. Magic does not necessarily mean "poorly defined" as some people presume. Zope does an excellent job at defining the magic that it does. I just do not like the concept of a framework that changes the essential nature of the language in which it is written. I think of a framework as a way to avoid writing the 80% of the code that any given web application needs. One could say, well, that 80% is magic, because it just happens, but there is a fundamental difference between a framework that changes the nature of your code, adding behavior that you would never suspect from the language itself, and a framework that provides functionality that you either invoke, or add to. Magic is great for some people, but a real PITA when you don't want the magic to happen in the way it does. Suddenly you find yourself delving deep in to the guts of the framework, reverse engineering the decisions made by the developers, finding workarounds. Suddenly the magic becomes an impediment - you are now expending much time and effort working through a system whose entire point was to save you time and effort. The framework is no longer the elegant helper taking away a lot of work that you would otherwise have to do. It IS the work you have to do. Again - this is an in-house debate, and no doubt a die-hard Rails developer will disagree, as is their right. But for me, I much prefer as little magic as possible.