Spring and "aspect-orientated programming" are completely ad-hoc! They use reflection and byte-code generation to implement various forms of runtime magic. This

Spring and "aspect-orientated programming" are completely ad-hoc! They use reflection and byte-code generation to implement various forms of runtime magic. This makes reasoning about ones code much much harder. IMHO there are much better ways to solve the dependency and cross-cutting concerns problems, unfortunately Java is not expressive enough to encode them. To be clear, I'm not saying Spring isn't useful, I'm saying the fact that Java needs Spring is unsatisfactory. I wouldn't say my situation is great, most jobs are Java jobs :)