> obfuscate the true nature of A to pretend B can be understood in isolation, and deal with the resulting confusion later What confusion? All the code in the b

> obfuscate the true nature of A to pretend B can be understood in isolation, and deal with the resulting confusion later What confusion? All the code in the body of an anonymous class is perfectly valid Java code that you can put in the body of an anonymous class today. There is no new magic here. > I would have to first explain what classes are, what static methods are, how methods can NOT in fact live outside a class in java, and only THEN explain that "to make things less verbose, in this VERY specific case, java allows you some syntactic-sugar to hide some of that complexity under a simpler-looking syntax, that would otherwise look weird in standard java". I don't think you would. There is no syntactic sugar here that Java doesn't already do. The body of an anonymous main class is valid as the body of an anonymous class today -- there is no special magic or any kind of special interpretation of code here -- and the notion of "implicitly supply an unnamed instance of a programming-in-the-large concept" is something Java already does today for packages and modules. Every method lives in a class, every class lives in a package, every package lives in a module. And yet, we don't require you to explicitly declare a package or a module. The current way we treat class declarations is the inconsistent one: it requires a class declaration even when it's not useful. Classes are no more fundamental to how Java "really" works under the covers than modules and class loaders. And yet, Java doesn't force you to learn these concepts before learning what a variable is or what a loop is. There is simply no way to know how Java really works without understanding modules. Modules are what gives actual meaning to access modifiers. Do you teach modules before loops today? Classes (and so static) and access modifiers really are completely meaningless before you have more than one class or more than one object, just as modules are meaningless until you have several of them. We are making Java more consistent in not an explicit invocation of a concept that is only meaningful once you add more context to it.