[ylhert]

I understand the "too much Magic" criticism of Rails from novices & intermediate Rails developers, but once you reach a sufficient level of mastery, I think this goes away.

After using Rails every day for 12 years I know pretty much all the ins and outs, and what is "magic" to others is just the robust tooling I love. Just like any tools, they are overwhelming and daunting when you don't know how to use them, but once you become proficient with them, they make your life so much easier. While it might be difficult when the "magic" doesn't do exactly what you want for your edge case, when you have a sufficient level of mastery, it's easy to find a way to adapt/modify/override the tooling and make it do what you want. Further, many times the tooling is there to keep you from doing things you probably should not be doing, and this kind of strict, opinionated, best practice enforcing philosophy has gotten me out of trouble at times, and I think it makes it much easier for engineers to move between Rails codebases and start being productive even faster.

I've done plenty of Node/JS/React and I honestly do not understand how people can prefer to use these stacks over Rails. For full stack web dev, Rails is such a pleasant place to work every day.

[cageface]

I've been doing Rails for literally decades. I understand the magic but I still struggle to figure out what's going on in larger codebases. The amount of context you have to pull in to understand what a particular block of code is doing can be huge.

[theonething]

> I've been doing Rails for literally decades.

Rails is 17 years old.

[gkop]

Also, Rails has moved away from the magic over the years, learning where it is and is not appropriate.