[erikpukinskis]

> Every bit of that "magic" is either meta programming or a dsl.

No it's not. The boot process hooks up a lot of things without your knowledge. It's an unbounded mass of side-effects that are caused by your code that you have zero path to understand or debug, other than pouring over docs and StackOverflow questions until you understand Rails architecture deeply enough to form a hypothesis about what part of your code might be implicated in the behavior of your app.

DSLs and meta-programming are not what people are talking about when they talk about "magic". They're talking about side effects.