alt Hacker NewsPredicated upon the definition of "magic" provided in the article: What is it, if anything, about magic that draws people to it? Is there a process wherein people build tolerance and acceptance to opaque abstractions through learning? Or, is it acceptance that "this is the way things are done", upheld by cargo cult development, tutorials, examples, and the like, for the sake of commercial expediency? I can certainly understand that seldom is time afforded to building a deep understanding of the intent, purpose, and effect of magic abstractions under such conditions.
Granted, there are limits to how deep one should need to go in understanding their ecosystem of abstractions to produce meaningful work on a viable timescale. What effect does it have on the trade to, on the other hand, have no limit to the upward growth of the stack of tomes of magical frameworks and abstractions?
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I think it's "this is the way things are done in order to achieve X". Where people don't question neither whether this is the only way to achieve X, nor whether they do really care about X in the first place.
It seems common with regard to dependency injection frameworks. Do you need them for your code to be testable? No, even if it helps. Do you need them for your code to be modular? You don't, and do you really need modularity in your project? Reusability? Loose coupling?
> What is it, if anything, about magic that draws people to it?
Simple: if it's magic, you don't have to do the hard work of understanding how it works in order to use it. Just use the right incantation and you're done. Sounds great as long as you don't think about the fact that not understanding how it works is actually a bug, not a feature.