[taeric]

My question in that vein is more of "why will this succeed, where beanshell failed?"

That is, I had REPL style environments for java a long time ago. And literally nobody used it. I can see arguments for having the REPL being in actual Java instead of a shell subset. But, Java has a long way to go from bootstrapping something in a repl and automatically saving it to something that will work as a normal entry point. (Though, again, even JRebel has existed for a long time now.)