[hobbs]

One word: indirection.

With each level of indirection, you get one more level of sophistication, but at the cost of one more level of complexity. OO has tons of indirection (+cough+ polymorphism +cough+).

Back in the old C++ days, before decent IDE's, I remember tracking through multiple code files in several different directories, just to figure out if an add operator had been overloaded - and if so, how. Man, was that a complex pain!

Lately, with Java, I've found myself in the same situation, but with XML config files. Some Java developers just love XML config files and often use them to direct reflective code execution (dynamic language envy). Needless to say, my IDE's are failing me again.