I think you have it the other way around 
Explicit doesn’t mean you can’t have good abstractions. In terms of reliability and maintainability I’d pick explicit over implicit (but as we’ll see it is not that simple)
I’d say in terms of how easy something is to learn I think implicit is probably easier because of information hiding. For example, elixir makes a number of things that are explicit in erlang implicit and from what I understand a big reason behind this is to make it easier to learn. It doesn’t change the abstraction though, it is still the same (think gen server optional callbacks). It is just that it pushes the time a beginner need to learn about a concept further into the future. In the gen server case, the implicit call backs may actually hurt maintainability as you can easily miss to implement a callback. So in general I think things are made implicit to do things faster now so that you don’t have to understand things until later.
I don’t think explicit implicit is enough though so I misuse a few other terms to try to make things clearer.
- Explicit/Implicit
- Expressiveness
- Terseness
- Abstraction
Are these scientific terms? Yes. Am I using them correctly? Probably not
How these combine gives you an overall idea which trade-offs are being made. Lets take a common example. ORM vs SQL.
SQL is explicit, but not terse. It is a good abstraction accessing relational data. SQL is not very expressive. ORM is implicit and terse. The abstraction is only good at the basic level. The query level of an ORM can be very expressive.
In terms of “learnability” I think ORM seems to have the upper hand, likely because it hides away important information you really should now before using it. Hence, implicit can be technical debt.
Is there a middleground? Yes, some query builders. They have the benefit of SQL in that the abstraction over data is good but they are also terse and expressive. The “query builders” are explicit, while still keeping a good abstraction. They are more maintainable and reliable than SQL and ORM. I’m not quite sure where ecto is in all this. I think somewhere in the middle but towards the ORM layer (just a feeling, no concrete data behind this).
