You can write non maintainable code at any level of abstraction. How hard it will be to debug is more dependent on the available tools to link the error to som

You can write non maintainable code at any level of abstraction. How hard it will be to debug is more dependent on the available tools to link the error to some source code. For example, there's a huge load of source to source compilers used in the web stack now. This is not such a big deal it seems, probably because debuggers make an adequate job to link the error to the original source. Actually I didn't directly touched Babylscript and so on, but I didn't saw much complaint about traceability of errors, so here I just guess: a more informed point of view would be valuable here. Self-modifying code might have been its purpose in highly resource constrained environment. But otherwise, in my opinion, generating a whole distinct source or tailoring a runnable AST has always been more understandable while offering the same level of flexibility.