> this is something you learn like day 1 on learning java, and it's something you write once in a blue moon, like 0.001% of the code you are going to write.

I think this is the exact audience for this change: for newbies in day 1 of 10 years in their programming journey. Less boilerplate to just swallow, less time spent debugging an otherwise-fine lab exercise if not for the wrong instantiation of Scanner, more time actually focusing on the basics they should be focusing on.

Granted, I still think Java is a horrible first language to learn from or teach with but this is a step in the right direction. Might revisit this opinion in a few years, who knows.

Oh also, we use Java in production so we also have a bunch of ad-hoc "scripts" written in Java for mostly one-off interactions. Nonetheless, these scripts can get unwieldy fast. You'd think I'm exaggerating the benefit here but I, for one, welcome one less level of indentation in these scripts.

Sure you could argue that it's better to learn java like this. But also you could argue that it was fine to learn java with an incantation. It's the first day of class, of course you are not going to understand everything you type. And you are getting exposure to important java concepts that you are going to circle back to later in your journey.

Fwiw, other JVM languages like SCALA have already done this exact thing way before. But whatever, it isn't either good or bad. And I can still use the old way out of respect for tradition.

To each their own