1) It's a library, there's no need for One True Library. Especially not in a Perl thread (CPAN is awesome). You use whatever works best for you. 2) Caught and re-thrown as a RuntimeException by the library. 3) No idea, but if I need that low level of control, I wouldn't be using a readLines convenience method. 4) Like you can pass files as a parameter, and create lists of them to iterate over.

5 - 8 are a different problem domain. But I was merely answering your hundreds of lines to read a file straw-man. I never suggested Java be used as a scripting language, if you really want to script on the JVM, use Scala, Groovy, Clojure or Kotlin.

But personally, I script in Python. Let's resurrect that old pissing match with Perl. ;)