When I see people design systems where, when they break, the only way to diagnose the problem is to do a code review, (not read the logs, or fire up a debugger), I wonder how they got along in their education without understanding the importance of debuggers, or why they hate their fellow programmers so much.

Spring comes out of a book that tried to reject the arcane nature of J2EE. I wonder sometimes if Mr Johnson recognizes hay the Beast he created is just as bad as the one he slayed. And how well he sleeps at night.

It got so bad they made a mini version of Spring, and even that is very declarative, and nearly impossible to explore.

In many, many applications explicit injection works just fine and is exactly what you want. But once you say "I am going to write a Spring Boot application", you are pretty much stuck with a big part of your application logic stuck in annotations, even when there is very little benefit over explicit code.

A lot of the development process consists of adding fields with particular names to classes that have a long inheritance chain of their own, and it's not trivial at all to understand what all of your options are and how they work behind the scenes.

I’ll definitely check out Tornado and the others for how they compare.

That is precisely my consternation. Much, much easier to reason about abstractions in the core Java language, like methods and objects, then to discover what code is being injected by an annotation. Java has outstanding IDEs that excel at navigating, analyzing, and debugging Java code, but putting so much logic in annotations is almost like you are trying to deliberately keep much of the code secret from the IDE.

It's interesting you took the time to post this. As the sibling to this comment indicate, there's a lot of 'magic' in many languages and frameworks. not just Spring. You don't off an example of a tech stack you do favor so one can only guess.

I will say that when I have encountered developers and teams who also disdain otherwise popular frameworks, they sometimes choose to roll their own instead of buckling down and learning said framework. Invariably they end up with a partial implementation of what they didn't understand, that is bug ridden, ill performing, and just plain bad.

There's a lot of good stuff in Spring (and EJB, and rails, and ...) the onus is on us, as professionals to learn it and use it where and when it's appropriate.

I think annotations are used many times in Java where abstractions like first class functions would be used in other languages.

I also find Lisp macros easier to reason about. "This compile time source code expands to this run time source code, which executes like so."

Perhaps surprisingly, I even find Ruby magic easier to reason about. "This method causes these three other methods to be defined to do x, y, z." It can get confusing, and final behavior highly dependent on the order in which the code executes, but I still feel like I have a mental model of how everything executes.

With annotations, depends on the code processing the annotations. You could have different code doing different thing with the exact same annotations. Your IDE can take you to the annotation declaration, but not directly to the code the annotation causes to execute. In the debugger, you can see the code in the call stack that was generated, but no link back to what annotation caused it to be generated.

It all just feels more like memorizing spells at Hogwarts, and less like an engineering process.