You see this a lot (even on this forum) with people referring to Rails "magic", when it can't possibly be anything but a bunch of lines of code being executed according to the rules of a certain interpreter.

To paraphrase Agatha Heterodyne, any insufficiently analyzed technology is indistinguishable from magic. I think their terminology is pretty reasonable.

Isn't this identical to what the original post I replied to was saying - those he refers to as the "clueless" have not sufficiently analyzed enough technology to distinguish it from magic. I wouldn't go so far as calling people clueless though, thinking of some things as magical black boxes frees up mental space.

Rails magic is vastly different from the magic referred to in the gp. Rails uses a number of dynamic approaches that create results that in other frameworks would take some amount of explicit configuration. The word "magic" in this context is ironic and merely means "dynamic".