Years ago, this was almost exactly my experience at my first software job, a large Rails monolith in the Ruby-on-Rails heyday. Obviously I was inexperienced, bu

Years ago, this was almost exactly my experience at my first software job, a large Rails monolith in the Ruby-on-Rails heyday. Obviously I was inexperienced, but aside from that, the application code itself was so hard to understand that I was seriously considering whether I was cut out for professional software development. It was just impossible to tell where things were defined, where data was coming from, when things were actually executing, etc. It was only after working on other projects in other languages (Clojure, Java, Scala, Nodejs, Elixir, Rust) that I started to realize that maybe not all languages lead to teams writing code that is this difficult to follow. People always say "oh, you can write terrible code in any language", and while this is true, it's a tautology. It doesn't actually tell you anything useful. I now think there is actually a pretty large spread in what kinds of code the various languages/frameworks encourage people to write. I'm not saying it guarantees what kind of code people will write, but, just for example, there absolutely is a difference between what the average Clojure programmer will write and what the average Java programmer will write. If all of the various languages and frameworks and libraries all just ended up with the same effort producing the same results, no one would ever make anything new, because it would be pointless to do so.