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Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

His words were quite harsh, but I do have to agree with him to some point. Rails has a culture of "magic", they have conventions on how to do things (e.g. naming stuff) and you aren't really allowed to diverge from that. This does not appeal to me and I'm not surprised to see that others don't like it either.

However, I can see how Rails "gets things done", and why so many people like it.

Perhaps the author came clear with his opinion a bit too hastily, but you shouldn't ignore someone just because you don't agree with every opinion he has. This was not an article about "why I don't like Rails", that's probably why he did not explain why he doesn't like it.

What comes to the article itself, I think it was decent and I don't agree 100% but not bad advice either.

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> His words were quite harsh, but I do have to agree with him to some point. Rails has a culture of "magic", they have conventions on how to do things (e.g. naming stuff) and you aren't really allowed to diverge from that.

Here we go with the "magic". It is not magic, it just code. Many people are just too lazy to investigate why things works the way they do, and how to change it when the defaults don't fit their needs.

Just for the record, you are wrong about naming conventions, they don't act as mandatory, you can use configuration methods to set up things the way you like it. E.g

  Class Users 
    set_table_name “Usuarios”
  end

Rails has many drawback points, I rather prefer Django views, than Rails, but all this "magic" conspiracy theory is just childish.

My first programming language was BASIC on a Commodore 64. So I've gone through many languages and frameworks in my day. In the last year I started writing an app in Ruby/Rails and I must say as someone with experience in other things, I like it.

I happen to like the "magic" aspect of Rails. The downside is that it does make Rails suitable for certain types of development and less so for things that fall outside of its paradigm. That's Ok, as long as you know that. Having said that, my app was actually OLAP, not OLTP, but I was able to extend the framework pretty well to do what I wanted, including working with legacy schemas. So it is more flexible than some give it credit for.

To me the real power isn't in Rails though, it's Ruby, which is the best programming language I've used, albeit extremely slow and inefficient. I haven't not used Python, so want to be clear I'm not making a Ruby v. Python claim.

To be fair, there is no magic in Rails, just a lot of 'defaults'. If you look at the code, its all very clear how those defaults are enabled, and there are clear methods for overriding them. The 'magic' thing started as a sort of marketing spiel to say "look at all these things that you don't need to worry about configuring, because they are all set to sensible defaults" but became 'mysterious' in some people's minds.

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