Of course there's nothing actually magic about it, because you can read the source. As with any large system, it's quite impenetrable in places, but I do suspec

Of course there's nothing actually magic about it, because you can read the source. As with any large system, it's quite impenetrable in places, but I do suspect some of the design choices have made it more complex than it could be. Trying to make a "literate" DSL which reads as much like English as possible means using it can become subtly surprising, as well as complicating the framework implementation. I am questioning the trade-off of terse readable code vs slightly more verbose code which is still readable but uses predictable language features. That said, I like Rails, and it works very well for the things it's designed to do.