[voidhorse]

I'm of two minds about it. On the one hand, the verbosity is arguably noise if you are first learning to program, or just want to write something quick, so I can see why people dislike it.

On the other hand, viability, classes, and "staticness" are all fundamental structural concepts in Java. Hiding them for a special case is sort of like lying, and, in the long term, I can actually see this special case causing more confusion for new learners. It's sometimes better to be upfront and transparent and force your users to work with the paradigm and semantics they chose to adopt, rather than pretend it doesn't exist. If Java had been designed to allow for top-level functions from the start, it'd be a different story. I think special casing is a generally bad way to evolve a programming language.

[gf000]

But there is absolutely no hiding, the design is very smart!

You simply get an unnamed implicit class like `class Tmp367 {` written at the top, and the runtime loader has been modified to be more accepting of main methods. There was basically a tiny language change, and no bytecode change, java semantics are just like they always were.

The Main loader just simply will accept an instance method named 'main' for a class with an empty constructor with no args, instead of psvm.

[klez]

It's hidden from the newbie who never used java before, that's what we're talking about. As you said, all that stuff is done implicitly. The user never sees any of that unless they go digging.