Finding references isn't really that much harder in Python, it tends to work almost always with e.g. Pycharm and has for a long time. There's of course always t

Finding references isn't really that much harder in Python, it tends to work almost always with e.g. Pycharm and has for a long time. There's of course always the shotgun approach and just searching for the identifier, which turns up all but the most opaque ways to do things (e.g. concatenating a string together, then doing getattr - which you can also do in Java with reflection). Ye olde metaprogramming tricks in Python would often elide inspectors like that of Pycharm, which is why it had e.g. special support for the Django or SQLalchemy ORMs. Personally, I've never been fond of those, and find the Java-zope-style code borderline unreadable (heavy reliance on magic, non-local effects and "oh that setuptools entry over there refers to this class here and that's how we load it" kind of tricks) and stuff like Django is (or was) not much better in some areas. More modern metaprogramming approaches can often be typed in Python, which resolves a lot of the issues with it. All that being said, the by far most common cause of bugs in Python is None in my experience, not any of the shenanigans the language allows you to do. Mid-sized (5k < loc < 100k?) can absolutely survive a complete "hostile takeover" from new developers, with all the same potential (but not mandatory) issues and pitfalls that pretty much any such codebase invites, in particular in dynamically typed languages.