OTOH, I wish popular web frameworks had a clearly documented 'no magic' option that doesn't critically depend on global methods and decorators. Again, not familiar with Play1 other than your example, but I recently did spent too much time wrangling a moderate backend build on with python/flask as a beginner going through the learning curve. After the first 5 minutes of 'look ma, I have a running server', the overreliance of globals became an unpleasant annoyance impeding test writing, with surprises abounding.