I don't think that this is entirely fair to Java programmers. Java's designers decided early on to lean fairly hard on reflection. Not just by giving Java stron

I don't think that this is entirely fair to Java programmers. Java's designers decided early on to lean fairly hard on reflection. Not just by giving Java strong reflective capabilities, but by sometimes deliberately choosing not to give Java great facilities for solving problems without using reflection. When I first came to Java from .NET, I was initially shocked at how heavily it was used in the Java space. (.NET arguably has even more powerful reflection facilities than Java does, but they are typically avoided at all costs.) But it didn't take me very long to realize that many of the C# language features I would have chosen to use instead of reflection simply don't have equivalents in Java. So, I don't think that it's necessarily that Java developers are addicted to this stuff, so much as that they just haven't been given any other choice.