[Jesin]

Really? Do ads for transistors describe them as "smart" or "magic"?

The idea here is not that abstractions are bad, it's that those that are frequently described by the people who made them as "smart" or "magic" are often not very helpful, and tend to do more harm than good. There are some exceptions, but good abstractions, while they may be described as "smart", don't usually include that in their name, and are rarely if ever called "magic".

[dgabriel]

Neither ActiveRecord nor Hibernate have the words "smart," or "magic," in their names. They were bad examples.

The problem is not with these two packages, but with the developers who use them without taking the time to figure out exactly what they do. Just because something makes a task convenient or easy, does not mean you aren't required to understand how they work.

It's copy/paste, cargo-cult programming, and you can't blame the tools.

[jsdalton]

I like Rails and ActiveRecord just fine, so I don't meant to bag on it. But they do talk a lot about "magic" in the Rails community. Check it: http://www.google.com/search?q=rails+magic

[dgabriel]

If this blog entry is just a restatement of "there is no silver bullet," then I agree. However, you can't blame the tools or their authors for what some people in the user community claim. The root of the problem is clearly a combination of lack of understanding and laziness.