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The Groovy project is looking for a new home

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Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#3

Post by adam77 »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #2

And just a couple of hours ago I was thinking "How come I haven't seen any articles on Groovy on the front page in a while?". Seems its hype has been eclipsed by Clojure and Scala.

Also, improvements in the Java language are eroding it's raison d'être.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#5

Post by revscat »

Props to what Guillaume has accomplished, but the original raison d'etre for Groovy existing has largely been supplanted by the rise of JRuby and Scala. When Groovy was initially developed JRuby was (arguably) not yet mature enough for production, so developers wanting to use Rails under the JVM were basically out of luck. Grails was developed in response to this need.

Now that JRuby is more mature (and, as of today, the only one of the two with official sponsorship) the need for Grails is greatly diminished. The only other major development effort that utilizes Groovy is Gradle, and that has been met with mixed levels of enthusiasm. Add to this that Java itself has made some strides with adding functional(-ish) features to the language, and the benefits that Groovy brings to the table are not as pronounced as they once were.

And for devs who are wanting something that is more purely functional there is Scala.

Given this I'm not particularly surprised to see Pivotal's decision here. Groovy has always struggled for more widespread relevance, and while it is sad to see this happen, it's also far from unreasonable.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#6

Post by lisa_henderson »

vezzy-fnord wrote: post #2

And just a couple of hours ago I was thinking "How come I haven't seen any articles on Groovy on the front page in a while?". Seems its hype has been eclipsed by Clojure and Scala.

I think the hype around Groovy was at its peak when folks were the most interested in having something like Ruby running on the JVM, and jRuby did not yet seem like a viable option. But even the hype for classic MRI Ruby has been waning, as developers look to do more with concurrency, and they discover dynamic everything-is-mutable languages have limits when it comes to concurrency. See Tony Arcieri's article "2012: The Year Rubyists Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Threads (or: What Multithreaded Ruby Needs to Be Successful)" and where he wrote:

"I’m talking about at Dr. Nic’s talk at RubyConf 2011, a little more than a year ago. Dr. Nic had a fairly simple message: when performance matters, build multithreaded programs on JRuby (also: stop using EventMachine). Now granted he was working the company that was subsidizing JRuby development at the time, but I didn’t, and I for one strongly agreed with him. Not many other people in the room did. The talk seemed to be met with a lot of incredulity."

So even among Rubyists, there has been growing interest in Ruby beyond the MRI, and if that is happening in the land of Ruby, then the argument for Groovy is that much weaker.

At the same time, the growing interest in dealing with concurrency certainly helped increase interest in Scala and Clojure, and furthermore, functional programming in general. If you are a developer who wants to harness the power of concurrency for greater speed, Scala and (especially) Clojure are full of interesting ideas for how to do that. Groovy, meanwhile, feels off-topic.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#8

Post by derpshmerp »

Groovy is a very flexible language with an elegant and approachable syntax.

It provides fantastic support for concurrency with gpars.

It provides the ability to write static or dynamic code.

It integrates seamlessly with Java.

I feel groovy has created it's own space in the ecosystem, continues to grow and has a bright future.

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