I agree that for experienced programmers working on large projects a little bit of verbosity around `main` is insignificant. But first impressions matter, especially when there is pervasive word of mouth about "verbosity".
Pretend you are a college student and you are taking your first programming class (e.g. CS 1) and your friends have told you that Java is "verbose". You start with "hello world" and you have to type `public static void` etc. One of your friends shows you the same code as a Python 1-liner.
Or similarly you're a beginning programmer in the workforce and your employer asks you to solve a problem using Java. You've heard Java is verbose and when you start with "hello world" you find that what you heard was true.
This is not a non-existent/minuscule audience. They should have fixed this decades ago. Better late than never.
I've been impressed with the modernization of Java over the last 10+ years. Simplifying "hello world" is a minor change relative to the others, but still an important one.
> But first impressions matter, especially when there is pervasive word of mouth about "verbosity"
I watched most of my comp sci 101/102/201 classmates fail out because they didn’t want to understand how things worked, they just wanted to make a lot of money.
I did cut my teeth on Java back in middle school-ish. It never bothered me at all, I was too busy having fun learning to program. I agree with GP, the mandatory class is a completely overblown complaint about Java.
Pretend you are a college student and you are taking your first programming class (e.g. CS 1) and your friends have told you that Java is "verbose". You start with "hello world" and you have to type `public static void` etc. One of your friends shows you the same code as a Python 1-liner.
Or similarly you're a beginning programmer in the workforce and your employer asks you to solve a problem using Java. You've heard Java is verbose and when you start with "hello world" you find that what you heard was true.
This is not a non-existent/minuscule audience. They should have fixed this decades ago. Better late than never.
I've been impressed with the modernization of Java over the last 10+ years. Simplifying "hello world" is a minor change relative to the others, but still an important one.