[strbean]

> You'll note that even Java now recognises that "public static void main(String[] args)" was pointless ceremony.

There is still the part of the ceremony that actually mattered: having a single entrypoint instead of the option to litter side effects throughout the file and having those side effects execute automatically on import.

> It sucks, but what's the alternative?

3.0 was a big missed opportunity to kill a lot of the deprecated cruft.

[lmm]

> the option to litter side effects throughout the file and having those side effects execute automatically on import.

You can actually do that in Java too with static initialisation blocks.

> 3.0 was a big missed opportunity to kill a lot of the deprecated cruft.

Maybe. 3.0 already came damn close to killing the language. If they'd made the changes any more radical it could easily have been another Perl 6.