This has been my experience too.

I constantly fear Spring Boot magically reconfiguring itself based on what it finds in the classpath, and half the codebase being annotations and import statements.

I've found the metaprogramming in Ruby much easier to understand and teach than Java's reflection and annotation processing.

[1,2,3].__len__()

Ruby has the ability to automatically download required gems in single-file scripts via bundler. I don't know of any equally convenient alternative for my python scripts.

e.g. https://gist.github.com/destiny-index/2a2e7e586bb9cd6e5c3000...

Michael Feathers uses several definitions of legacy code, depending on the situation. In your situation, he defines legacy code as follows.

"legacy code is the product of ... when your team turns over faster than your code turns over." [1]

1. https://www.software-engineering-unlocked.com/legacy-code-mi...