I have a bit of opposing viewpoint. One of my biggest hurdles ever in understanding large codebases comes from the sheer amount of code involved per any architectural unit. IDE may let me move around a codebase quicker, but if a single functionality is smeared into 20 classes in three separate inheritance hierarchies, this will still cause me headaches until I draw the entire structure on a large sheet of paper and keep it on my desk. There is only so much thing I can keep in my head or in front of my eyes at the same time, so the denser the language (in terms of ability to abstract and DRY things), the easier I find a large codebase to work with.