Interesting examples. I am still conflicted about DI. I have seen it used too little which means that classes become basically untestable. OTOH, things like Spr

Interesting examples. I am still conflicted about DI. I have seen it used too little which means that classes become basically untestable. OTOH, things like Spring (don't know about Dagger) seem so overcomplex and hard to figure out, I can certainly understand your point. I've had some luck with just hand-rolled DI in certain cases (e.g. a class that I know is mostly coordinating other classes; in that case, I might just inject all the dependencies manually for easy testing but provide a default constructor for actual production use), but I think it's hard to find the right balance. Agreed about the annotations; it's one of the annoying things about Java, IMHO. The language itself is so inexpressive that people have to resort to annotations to do basic stuff. I think some level of "metaprogramming" can be useful (regardless of the language), either for boilerplate reduction or for removing aspects like logging from the main code, but it's too easy to become "clever" about it (not just in Java; Rubyists abuse metaprogramming way too often too, for example). I generally favour "explicit over implicit", which also means that I generally dislike inheritance because of all the non-local reasoning.