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Spring magic is both relatively straight-forward to understand, and actually relies on heavy typing for autowiring.

Uh right, sure. But then there's the Spring lifecycle to take into consideration and it may happen that your annotations may or may not work. It depends (of course it's not totally aleatory, there's some logic behind it, usually obvious after several hours debugging ;)

Another honorable mention is Spring Boot @Conditional for which adding a minor little diversion from defaults will turn a functioning happy project in a dysfunctional nightmare.

:'(

I agree with you completely on that. I'll clarify that, to me, there's a difference between straight-forward and obvious. And Spring is terrible at being obvious. Some annotation on a class 5 transitive dependencies deep can affect your code. It's definitely really deep into "spooky action at a distance", and that's always a nightmare for debugging. But once you see all the pieces, it's (usually) relatively straight-forward to describe what is happening.

Spring is semi-magical but when you learn the whole thing it gives you godlike abilities.

Really? Try Clojure then

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