[ljm]

I'm not saying annotations are bad though, I'm saying Spring's over-reliance on them makes the code harder to follow. Some of those annotations are actually done at compile-time via Lombok, which makes it even harder to know what the hell is happening.

Decorators and annotations are essentialy higher-order functions and higher-order classes, but there is nothing about them that makes it intuitive. They actually become quite difficult to write and much harder to debug, OOP's shit version of a monad.