[throwaway2016a]

> Everytime I have to grep the codebase to find where a method magically came from, I die a little on the inside.

Are you using Rails? My experience is a lot of the "magic" comes from the use of Rails not the language itself. Though since Rails inspired so many other Ruby frameworks and libraries, the magic has spread a little bit.

Overall I like Ruby for writing DSLs since it has tools in the language that make doing so really easy. But for a website I would... and this is going to be really unpopular... actually probably choose PHP over it. Easier to find coders, equally bad coding practices, but less magic.[1]

[1] IRL I tend to choose Node.js or Go but I have used PHP extensively in my career because it is everywhere. And Ruby because for the longest time Ruby was cool and PHP was frowned upon. Now they are both frowned on.