[emodendroket]

Really this is what drives me nuts about Rails. You can never really know what exactly any line of code is going to do.

[weaksauce]

Do you have an example of such code that does something off label or tricky to intuit?

[zrail]

Active record hooks. Observers especially are a spooky action at a distance factory.

[thih9]

Altering expected framework functionality. E.g. a custom getter method for an ActiveRecord attribute.

Technically this isn't a Rails-only thing; but since Rails relies so much on convention, there are many opportunities to break it (and possibly bring suffering to other devs).

[emodendroket]

Besides the other examples already given, monkey patching is another offender, as are proxy tricks with methods like send or respond_to (technically not Rails-specific but I associate this style with Rails).

[Mikeb85]

I mean, this can be any highly expressive language. Common Lisp macros can get crazy, Haskell has sugar on sugar, Perl all looks like code golf to me, etc...

[BurningFrog]

Yeah, as much as really like Ruby, there is just too much Magic going on.

I'm a programmer, not a wizard!

[Lammy]

> I'm a programmer, not a wizard!

What if I consider those to be the same thing? Programming is an alchemical process through which we can contribute to humanity beyond the time-limit imposed by our physical bodies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Work_(Hermeticism) :)

"The magnum opus is pre-eminently the creation of man by himself, that is, the full and complete conquest which he can make of his faculties and his future; it is pre-eminently the perfect emancipation of his will."