Totally agree. The annotations basically just mark code. Things like AspectJ can then place side-effects around marked (and unmarked!) code. Also, coming acros

Totally agree. The annotations basically just mark code. Things like AspectJ can then place side-effects around marked (and unmarked!) code. Also, coming across transient runtime errors because you use multi-catch (a basic Java language feature) and some java library that injects bytecode is pretty lame. All the benefits of a typed+compiled language with all the benefits of monkey patching!