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Comment by sethherr | Hacker News Reader

I agree with the code generation of libraries in Phoenix being a drawback.

I think it maybe a reaction to there being too much magic in Rails dependencies, but it makes upgrades much harder.

I've found the code gen approach to be very positive. Most of the generated code is minimal app-specific modules that in turn `use` Phoenix modules. This gives you a handy place to insert your customization w/o having to resort to dynamic metaprogramming contortions the way you used to have to in Rails.

I also like the philosophy of magical experiences, without magical code. Everything is very traceable. And most of the time you don't even need to use the generators - just make your module, register in the right places, and you're done.

Jose has written about this before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34935952

After reading that, I understand exactly where he’s coming from - I too have overridden a bunch of Devise in a bunch of different ways in various projects.

But, unlike the rest of Elixir and Phoenix, this approach doesn’t feel like an elegant solution - it feels like a moderately ok trade off.

A lot of that code generation is to facilitate macros. Personally, I don’t like macros when a little extra code to make a function call would work just fine.

Might be misunderstanding code generation. This means literally writing code into your project via a script. It has nothing to do with macros.

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