[russell]

I have been the sole developer working on a enterprise web project (jboss/spring/hibernate) with extreme decoupling: 400k LOC and 48K of XML tying it together, rampant OOP and patterns du jour. First problem - too much code. Second problem - difficult to debug, because the flow of control often stopped at an interface. If the original developers had done decoupling as needed, the code would have been 50% smaller, more if done in something like Python, maybe 80% less.

[brown9-2]

difficult to debug, because the flow of control often stopped at an interface

Not sure if I understand how this is a problem - you should always have the concrete class's name in any stacktraces that you have, either from exceptions or by attaching a debugger. Are you attaching a debugger?

Not only that, but if you have your application's logging based around logger name = class name, you'll always know exactly which classes/objects are in control.

Also, if you have the "XML tying it together" how can anything hide behind the interface?