>> Phoenix also feels a little bit magical in the way Rails is
>
> I've felt this about every backend web framework I've encountered, Django included. There's a tension between reducing boiler-plate, and not having directory structures/symbol names/etc. have some implicit order to them. If you want explicitness, don't use a framework and maybe use something like Flask/Werkzeug
One of the things I love about phoenix is how little magic there is. Not directed at you, but I agree there is always some amount of "it just works" with a framework but Elixir/Phoenix felt immeasurably more "the code is here" vs "well that particular thing is method_missing'd a few layers down into this which routes into that and then kaboom, here's your entire app."
This is helped by Ecto, which is the perfect mix of helpful and not helpful to me. It gets what I ask for and only what I ask for. It tells me when I've mucked up and generally it feels like a nice API to SQL vs its own thing (and dropping custom SQL is super easy). The data layer is most often the most hidden magic layer in frameworks IMO as routing some HTTP GET to some controller/function/whatever is pretty simple and easy to reckon.
Agreed, Ecto is the perfect balance of helpful and explicit. It allows people to avoid the performance footguns of typical ORMs, while still providing a friendly way to do that relation mapping, pluggable way to do validation, etc. and there are just things you can do with joins + select that an ORM can’t do, but Ecto can.
The magical parts of Elixir/Phoenix, would be the naming conventions of Controller/View/Template (which I think can be overridden), and `use` which brings a lot of useful functions but it isn’t obvious to a new user how to source docs for that.
>
> I've felt this about every backend web framework I've encountered, Django included. There's a tension between reducing boiler-plate, and not having directory structures/symbol names/etc. have some implicit order to them. If you want explicitness, don't use a framework and maybe use something like Flask/Werkzeug
One of the things I love about phoenix is how little magic there is. Not directed at you, but I agree there is always some amount of "it just works" with a framework but Elixir/Phoenix felt immeasurably more "the code is here" vs "well that particular thing is method_missing'd a few layers down into this which routes into that and then kaboom, here's your entire app."
This is helped by Ecto, which is the perfect mix of helpful and not helpful to me. It gets what I ask for and only what I ask for. It tells me when I've mucked up and generally it feels like a nice API to SQL vs its own thing (and dropping custom SQL is super easy). The data layer is most often the most hidden magic layer in frameworks IMO as routing some HTTP GET to some controller/function/whatever is pretty simple and easy to reckon.