> The right thing, if there is one, consists of a willingness to learn how stuff works even if it’s unfamiliar or seems complicated The key point is: how hard

> The right thing, if there is one, consists of a willingness to learn how stuff works even if it’s unfamiliar or seems complicated The key point is: how hard is this magic to learn, and how much is there learn? For some types of "magic" there is simply no way to learn how they work. They're just arbitrarily baked in in such a way that even a person skilled would never figure it out. You just have to hope that the documentation is good and put your faith in it. It's true that programming languages ask us to accept things on faith in just such a way, but that is why languages themselves are so minimalist - they have to be so that we can afford to learn them at such expert level that we can use them competently despite their magical nature. Frameworks like Rails, Grails and Django are anything but minimalist. To ask us to learn everything about them without strong links to the foundational languages they are built on is asking too much - it doesn't scale.