Java How to Program, Early Objects, 11th Edition

25.1 Introduction

9

As educators, it’s a joy to write this chapter on what may be the most important pedagogic improvement in Java since its inception more than two decades ago. The Java community—by far the largest programming language community in the world—has grown to more than 10 million developers. But along the way, not much has been done to improve the learning process for novice programmers. That changes dramatically in Java 9 with the introduction of JShell—Java’s REPL (read-evaluate-print loop).1

1. We’d like to thank Robert Field at Oracle—the head of the JShell/REPL effort. We interacted with Mr. Field extensively as we developed Chapter 25. He answered our many questions. We reported JShell bugs and made suggestions for improvement. ...