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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

#21

Post by cowardlydragon »

tree_of_item wrote: post #4

Doesn't Google depend on them now, due to Gradle being a part of the official Android toolchain? Seems like they should be interested in doing this.

It might be for the best. I heard that the VMWare people are a bit scuzzy and unethical, such as slapping legal threats on authors to take over their github projects. Of course that was from what I thought was a drama queen ex-groovy committer, but now he looks much more sane.

Pivotal is trying to push vert.x now, which I think is a node.js for JVM type of thing.

Since they never did make an awesome configure-spring-with-groovy conversion, I guess this won't be too painful of a split.

Groovy was the #1 JVM language besides Java for quite a while, I think it still is despite Clojure/Scala hype. It was before pivotal took it on, and it probably will be fine.

It's feature set is actually fairly stable. It doesn't need to do Java lambdas, since it has its own, so no major Java cross compatibilities to port from Java8.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#22

Post by michaelcampbell »

emsy wrote: post #16
revscat wrote: post #5

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,…

I really like to know why you were downvoted, because I made the same observations you did and basically came to the same conclusion. I'd add the really bad IDE support. I've met some developers that said the only thing that kept them from leaving Groovy was that Grails and Spock are really great and worth the trouble. Other than that I see Groovy's future more as a glue language and as a language for tools. Which I'…

> I'd add the really bad IDE support.

I find IntelliJ support quite excellent.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#23

Post by fletchowns »

mdaniel wrote: post #19
j_s wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coral cache: http://glaforge.appspot.com.nyud.net/article/the-groovy-proj...

I almost wish Coral-caching links was the default, given that making the frontpage can be a real bad thing for smaller sites. Also, if the "portless" version doesn't work for anyone, I've experienced that adding :8080 and :8090 can have better luck. I am unaware of the difference between the two ports.

Kinda robs people of ad impressions though

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#24

Post by revscat »

cowardlydragon wrote: post #17
revscat wrote: post #5

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,…

NOPE. Ruby doesn't offer one of Groovy's killer features: optional static typing. And Scala... far too alien and complex. There was some talk out there by one of the original Scala dudes talking about how there are something like 30 different fundamental types in Scala. Groovy offers the most accessible functional programming paradigms to Java programmers. It is a sweet spot.

Well, I actually like Groovy, and was trying to keep my personal opinion out of my original post. The fact remains, though, that whatever strengths Groovy has as a language it has struggled to gain significant traction.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#25

Post by mgkimsal »

revscat wrote: post #24
cowardlydragon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NOPE. Ruby doesn't offer one of Groovy's killer features: optional static typing. And Scala... far too alien and complex. There was some talk out there by one of the original Scala dudes talking about how there are something like 30 different fundamental types in Scala. Groovy offers the most accessible functional programming paradigms to Java programmers. It is a sweet spot.

Well, I actually like Groovy, and was trying to keep my personal opinion out of my original post. The fact remains, though, that whatever strengths Groovy has as a language it has struggled to gain significant traction.

IME, the strengths were primarily that it was Java+. However, the Java-heavy organizations that might most benefit from it tended to also be the most averse to change. Changing "that much" for "only" incremental change wasn't worth the risk for risk-averse companies. The companies that weren't risk averse tended to try it, but also go outside the JVM altogether when appropriate. So... in a way it was too good at just being a more useful Java, but that wasn't enough for Java-heavy shops.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#26

Post by cowardlydragon »

lisa_henderson wrote: post #6
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:…

Again, just because Groovy rhymes with Ruby doesn't mean that is its sole purpose.

Ruby doesn't have optional strong typing, which is critical to Groovy's bridging of Java and Ruby.

The optional strong typing enables a host of significant advantages, from code readability and assertions to IDE tooling/autocomplete ease... better API design... and many other things.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#27

Post by coldtea »

revscat wrote: post #24
cowardlydragon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NOPE. Ruby doesn't offer one of Groovy's killer features: optional static typing. And Scala... far too alien and complex. There was some talk out there by one of the original Scala dudes talking about how there are something like 30 different fundamental types in Scala. Groovy offers the most accessible functional programming paradigms to Java programmers. It is a sweet spot.

Well, I actually like Groovy, and was trying to keep my personal opinion out of my original post. The fact remains, though, that whatever strengths Groovy has as a language it has struggled to gain significant traction.

>The fact remains, though, that whatever strengths Groovy has as a language it has struggled to gain significant traction

Compared to what? JRuby? Groovy's adoption, from the number's I've seen, walks all over JRuby's.

It's just that the Java world is not fashionable (besides say Clojure) and you don't often hear from the people who use Groovy in their enterprise projects, whereas 10 startups using the language-du-jour can create the impression that it's the hot shit on HN.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#28

Post by vorg »

revscat wrote: post #5

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,…

> Given this I'm not particularly surprised to see Pivotal's decision here

Pivotal's decision is likely based not only on what you see, but on what else they see but you can't. They can see trends and revenues before the rest of us can, like former SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson who jumped ship over to Scala.

These are some concerns with Groovy I've blogged and commented about a lot over the past few years:

* the failure of static typing to take hold in any way. Groovy's a dynamically-typed scripting language for Grails, Gradle build scripts, and Java class manipulation. Virtually no-one uses Groovy to build systems, and even Gradle's codebase is virtually all Java. Groovy's a good scripting language for Java, like bash for Linux, and the project management should have stuck to their knitting and made it better instead of diversifying into static typing and now Android.

* their obsession with popularity rankings. Tiobe, Stack Overflow, and Github are gamed. The download numbers are fabricated. This goes far beyond what other programming language communities get up to. A year ago Groovy was number #18 in Tiobe (Oct 2003) but now they're not even in the top 50, and in April 2011, Groovy dropped from #25 to #65 in a single month, all this because of someone manipulating search engine results for some short-term marketing.

* the constant fight for control over the product. The original post is to a person's personal blog instead of one on Codehaus or Pivotal. This started happening a year ago, when that person also started soliciting for subscribers to a personal weekly mailout instead of supporting the community mailing list. No-one knows who controls the new Groovy website being promoted. One of the 5 despots in the official Codehaus despotry is trying to take over. This has been going on for the entire lifetime of Groovy when its creator was pushed out.

* the lack of documentation or any language standard designed to make people dependent on consulting and conferences. In the Groovy 1.x days, they even appeared to be changing things to shake off other independent documentation efforts or addon software like Groovy++. When the present management took over, they kept the JSR standard inactive to deliberately prevent anyone building another implementation.

I'm only talking about what happened to Groovy after its creator James Strachan left the project, not before. As for Grails, I don't know much about it except that Groovy's direction seems to be dictated by it. And Gradle seems to be on course for dropping Groovy as their sole scripting language if you read between the lines on their website.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#29

Post by pjmlp »

coldtea wrote: post #27
revscat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I actually like Groovy, and was trying to keep my personal opinion out of my original post. The fact remains, though, that whatever strengths Groovy has as a language it has struggled to gain significant traction.

> The fact remains, though, that whatever strengths Groovy has as a language it has struggled to gain significant traction Compared to what? JRuby? Groovy's adoption, from the number's I've seen, walks all over JRuby's. It's just that the Java world is not fashionable (besides say Clojure) and you don't often hear from the people who use Groovy in their enterprise projects, whereas 10 startups using the language-du-j…

No, but you do get presentations at local JUG and those have been pretty empty of Groovy content in the last years.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#30

Post by davidgerard »

tree_of_item wrote: post #4

Doesn't Google depend on them now, due to Gradle being a part of the official Android toolchain? Seems like they should be interested in doing this.

Gradle is heaven for anyone who's ever had to work with Ant in earnest. The programming language is actually a language, not a horrifying accidentally-Turing-complete DSL!
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