Comment by tharkun__
5 years ago
I'll add my voice to your parent.
Statically typed languages and languages that force you to be explicit are awesome for going into a codebase you have never seen and understanding things. You can literally just let your IDE show you everything. All questions you have are just one Ctrl-click away and if proper abstraction (ala Clean Code) has been used you can ignore large swaths of code entirely and just look at what you need. Naming is awesome and my current and previous code bases were both really good in this (both were/are mixes of monolith and microservices). I never really care where a file is located. I know quite a few coders that will want to find things via the folder tree. I just use the keyboard shortcut to open by name and start guessing. Usually first or second guess finds what I need because things are named well and consistently.
Because we use proper abstractions I can usually see at first glance what the overall logic is. If I need to know how a specific part works in detail I can easily drill down via Ctrl-click. With a large inlined blob of code I would have a really hard time. Do I skip from line 1356 to 1781 or is that too far? Oh this is JavaScript and I don't even know if this variable here is a string or a number or both depending on where in the code we are or maybe it's an object that's used as a map?
The whole thing is too big to keep in my head all the time and I will probably not need to touch the same piece of code over and over and instead I will move from one corner to the next and again to another corner over the course of a few weeks to months.
That's why our Frontend code is being converted to TypeScript and our naming (and other) conventions make even our javascript code bearable.
Is your backend Java or C#? Your IDE description feels like Java w/ Eclipse or IntelliJ or C# w/ Visual Studio. I have similar experience to you. The "discoverability" of a large codebase is greatly increased by combining language with tooling. If you use Java with Maven-like dependency management (you can use Gradle these days if 'alergic' to Maven's pom.xml), the IDE will usually automatically download and "hook-up" source code. It is ridiculous how fast you can move between layers of (a) project code, (b) in-house libraries, (c) open source libraries, and (d) commercial closed-source libraries (decompile on the fly in 2021!). (I assume all the same can be done for C# w/ Visual Studio.)
To be fair, when I started my career, I worked on a massive C project that was pretty easy to navigate because it was a mono-repo with everything in one place. CTags could index 99% of what you needed, and the macros weren't out of control. (Part of the project was also C++, but written in the style of career C programmers who only wanted namespaces and trivial generics like vector and map! Again, very simple to navigate huge codebase.)
I'm still surprised in 2021 when someone asks me to move a Java class to a different package during a code review. My inner monologue says: "Really... do they still use a file browser? Just use the IDE to find it!"