[WalterBright]

Java just pushes the complexity into the user's code. For example, a friend of mine once gushed to me about Java IDEs - with one click of a button, a hundred lines of boilerplate are automatically added!

I replied a good language shouldn't need boilerplate code automatically inserted.

[kamaal]

This is called 'Waterbed Theory' and is ascribed to Larry Wall.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed_theory

[tonyedgecombe]

On the other hand the refactoring tools for Java/C# are miles ahead of anything for C/C++.

[WillReplyfFood]

Boilerplate bureacracy usually happens, when Configurations are not itteratable and/or a language does not enforce the providing of meaningfull defaults. I find both sides guilt and charged here...

[WalterBright]

Metaprogramming enables insertion of custom boilerplate without need of an IDE.

[kamaal]

>>language does not enforce the providing of meaningfull defaults.

There is more to this. This can can also happen if the language doesn't have features to heavy lift complicated code patterns well. You have to then use massive amount of code wall texts to make the same thing happen.

Part of the reasons why C based languages seem to die all the time, is because you sooner or later have to add features to catch up with the complexity of software getting written around. That either causes enormous amounts of ugly unusable bloat, or you have to go decades of backward compatibility breakage. The languages are just too brittle to work with change.

To give you an example. The best innovation that has come out of Python as a language is they changed the print feature from being a keyword to being a function. This is the biggest innovation they could manage in decades. And even this requires breaking backwards compatibility and having the entire world's Python code bases to go through several decades of upgrade cycles.

You see all this and just move on the next new language, like Go. And then the cycle starts again.