Simon Willison’s Weblog

18th December 2024

Java in the Small (via) Core Java author Cay Horstmann describes how he now uses Java for small programs, effectively taking the place of a scripting language such as Python.

TIL that hello world in Java can now look like this - saved as hello.java:

void main(String[] args) {
    println("Hello world");
}

And then run (using openjdk 23.0.1 on my Mac, installed at some point by Homebrew) like this:

java --enable-preview hello.java

This is so much less unpleasant than the traditional, boiler-plate filled Hello World I grew up with:

public class HelloWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println("Hello, world!");
    }
}

I always hated how many concepts you had to understand just to print out a line of text. Great to see that isn't the case any more with modern Java.