I completely agree. I'll step back from my normal state of bashing the Rails community for a moment and give a quick personal example from Python:
I use an incredibly helpful library that basically allows one to create a public API out of their Django models with very little effort. It even generates documentation and validation, etc. The problem is, it uses metaclass "magic" and decorators for everything. I understand both these concepts well enough, but when an entire system is built around using these two powerful constructs, unwinding how things happen becomes rather difficult (for someone who doesn't use metaclasses and decorators for everything) -- to the point that if the library can't do something, it isn't even worth my time to properly modify it.
There were certainly other ways to go about creating the provided functionality. Django's inner-class-based approach would have been a good start! And there'd be nothing wrong with supplying helpful decorators, or even using metaclasses here and there, but the library (at least to me) screams "magic for magic's sake".
I use an incredibly helpful library that basically allows one to create a public API out of their Django models with very little effort. It even generates documentation and validation, etc. The problem is, it uses metaclass "magic" and decorators for everything. I understand both these concepts well enough, but when an entire system is built around using these two powerful constructs, unwinding how things happen becomes rather difficult (for someone who doesn't use metaclasses and decorators for everything) -- to the point that if the library can't do something, it isn't even worth my time to properly modify it.
There were certainly other ways to go about creating the provided functionality. Django's inner-class-based approach would have been a good start! And there'd be nothing wrong with supplying helpful decorators, or even using metaclasses here and there, but the library (at least to me) screams "magic for magic's sake".