Arguments Against Annotations

Question

My team is moving to Spring 3.0 and there are some people who want to start moving everything into Annotations. I just get a really bad feeling in my gut (code smell?) when

Answer 1

It's 2018 and this point is still relevant.

My biggest problem with annotations is that you don't have an idea what the annotations are doing. You're cutting some caller code off and hiding it somewhere disconnected from the callee.

Annotations were introduced to make the language more declarative and less programmatic. But if you're moving the majority of the functionality to annotations, you are effectively switching your code to a different language (and not a very good one at that). There's very little compile-time checking. This article makes the same point: https://blog.softwaremill.com/the-case-against-annotations-4b2fb170ed67

The whole heuristic of "move everything to configuration so that people don't have to learn how to code" has gotten out of control. Engineering managers aren't thinking.

Exceptions:

• JUnit
• JAX-RS