gorky1

That would be totally illegal if Nintendo was making the laws, but yes, pretty much.

I'd say this doesn't bypass anything, it's just some kind of virtual device? I'm using it to read legally purchased books on unsupported hardware.

You're right, and it's extremely hard to undo.

Once you have that complexity, you'll always be taking away something from somebody by simplifying.

So all simplifications end up as additional "if" clauses, defeating the purpose.

Intellij Idea on Linux runs surprisingly well on 15 year old T400 Thinkpads. It's actually pleasant to use for small hobby Java projects.

The question was "what has reflection got to do with it". I've used reflection for dependency inversion, so I think that's what it's got to do with it.

If you can do dependency inversion without reflection, more power to you :-) We can't do classpath scanning in the project I'm working on because of the size of the classpath, and compile time configuration using direct imports would introduce cycles, so reflection it is for us, in one form or another.

I've seen people learning about dependency inversion from a book called "Clean Architecture", then proceeding to apply it to every bit of code they write, to make it "clean". It makes code difficult to trace by reading alone. Indirection may be cheap, but it adds up.

Reflection allows you to put the interfaces to Account and Customer into a shared module and the business logic implementations into their own mutually independent modules, thus removing the cyclic compile time dependency.

You "wire up" the implementations at runtime, using reflection.

This kind of software chooses you :-)

Actually, it's quite rewarding once you get into it. Serious business, people depend on you getting it right, but still nobody dies if a bug slips by.

Getting into it requires a year or two, though.