> it's not a big drain on time to do the occasional full text search or look something up through programmatic introspection
Okay, this won't probably be 100% on topic, but in my experience how well these methods work is inversely proportional to the size of the codebase and also quite badly in some cases depending on how the code is written.
The other day I was working on a Java enterprise codebase (monolith, ~300K LoC) and I shouldn't have had that many issues navigating the codebase, however someone made a validator that resolves the logic to a specific class at runtime. So you'd basically have validator.validate(Object someObject). Suddenly if I wanted to find all of the places where validator.validate(MyObject myObject) is called, I could not do that easily and with naming like validator.validate(entity) all over the place, text search didn't help much either. They had an okay type system but chose not to use it, just because they wanted to pass in arbitrary objects, without regard for how easy finding usages will be in the future.
My point is, that you can probably write code that's easy or hard to navigate in any language (within reason), but I'll gladly take whatever tools I can get in any stack out there!
> however someone made a validator that resolves the logic to a specific class at runtime. So you'd basically have validator.validate(Object someObject).
Okay, this won't probably be 100% on topic, but in my experience how well these methods work is inversely proportional to the size of the codebase and also quite badly in some cases depending on how the code is written.
The other day I was working on a Java enterprise codebase (monolith, ~300K LoC) and I shouldn't have had that many issues navigating the codebase, however someone made a validator that resolves the logic to a specific class at runtime. So you'd basically have validator.validate(Object someObject). Suddenly if I wanted to find all of the places where validator.validate(MyObject myObject) is called, I could not do that easily and with naming like validator.validate(entity) all over the place, text search didn't help much either. They had an okay type system but chose not to use it, just because they wanted to pass in arbitrary objects, without regard for how easy finding usages will be in the future.
My point is, that you can probably write code that's easy or hard to navigate in any language (within reason), but I'll gladly take whatever tools I can get in any stack out there!