[jd20]

I've been pondering this topic lately, as I come back to Rails (seems every few years I'll write a Rails app on the side, and my brain has totally forgotten everything since last time): one other way to look at this "magic", is it makes programming feel "intuitive". Not sure how to do something, I often find I can just "guess" the right and most natural way, and the code will just work. For that reason, I always feel like I'm most productive when writing Ruby (I really love Go too, just for different reasons).

I can totally see how the situation you describe would be frustrating too, I felt the same about Java annotations when they came out, and on massive code bases it could become a nightmare when used to the extreme. My own experience has been that Go scales very well to large code bases, I've never wanted to try the same with Rails.

[dmix]

I've had this same experience bouncing back to Rails for contract gigs. You always feel this temptation like you're missing out on 'real' programming, performance with low level code or super clever languages like Haskell or Clojure. But ultimately Rails is just a great programming experience for getting the job done.

Despite it's faults and the problems with using 'magic' frameworks like Rails it's a really great language/framework for what it's meant to do. And it still is in 2017 despite what some people say (although Elixir/Phoenix is getting there if it can reach the scale of adoption as Rails).

That's the end of the road lesson, that there's the right tools for different jobs. There is no 'perfect' solution. Not rabbit to keep chasing.

Either way though it's still good to get exposure to as many different languages as possible (low level ala C, easily parallel-based languages ala Erlang, some lisps, typed languages like Haskell, dynamic FP ala clojure, etc).