With reference to Zope: it should be noted that the Zope 2 of old and the modern Zope 3 are themselves on opposite ends of the magic/non-magic spectrum. The Zo

With reference to Zope: it should be noted that the Zope 2 of old and the modern Zope 3 are themselves on opposite ends of the magic/non-magic spectrum. The Zope community learnt many lessons from the magic used in Zope 2, and radically altered the fundamental patterns for Zope 3 away from magic. These days people who live in Zope 2 environments (eg Plone) make extensive use of Zope 3 technologies and patterns via the Five (2+3) bridging mechanism. Ie, in the Zope world at large, "non-magic" is now considered best practice; its not fair anymore to consider today's Zope a framework that changes the essential nature of the language. Its been interesting to see the initial Rails elation getting tempered later by grumblings about the pricetag of such magic; the Zope world had gone through the same thing but a few years earlier. Today's Zope has already learnt from this and moved on. In fact the community has even been able to combine some of the philosophies of Rails (eg avoiding XML sit ups) with the Zope 3 paradigms, to create the Grok framework which remains wholly Zope 3 compatible. This really has the potential to strike a good balance.