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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

#51
Groovy has one of the nicest approaches to compile time metaprogramming (apart from Lisp, of course).

I often wish it had gained more momentum before Clojure and Scala showed up.

The Java interoperation is much, much cleaner than in Jython or JRuby due to Groovy being a first class JVM language.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#52
post #41
post #29

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

I think people that go to JUGs and people that do enterprise development are entirely different species...

In Germany JUG are all about enterprise.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#53
post #20

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Groovy IDE support is now really good in the groovy on grails tool suite, which is the main thing that I fear will disappear with this decision. Most refactors, pretty good line-by-line debugging, etc. Edit: GGTS is A spring-specific eclipse distribution..

It's also extremely good in Intellij (at least, in Ultimate...which is what I'm using daily).

I tried to install the Groovy plugins on a default Eclipse installation and never got the same result I got on the bloated default GGTS installation. But even with GGTS I had a mediocre experience at best. I tried the commercial version of IntelliJ two years ago and it was okay, but still lacking compared to the Java autocompletition. I'm really happy that the situation is better now.

As I use Groovy more of a host for DSLs (like Gradle or Spock), I hope tooling for this areas will improve. In my eyes, this is Groovy's sweet spot.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#54

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.

The concurrency support with gpars is a really killer feature. I'd urge everyone to take at least just take a look at it. Extremely easy and made very "natural" with Groovy syntax. Yeah you can do concurrency with about every other language, etc. but this is within a JVM context.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#55
post #3

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.

Even with a big step like Java 8, Java is very very far from being comparable to more modern, expressive languages.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#56
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post #49

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If you're gonna trash talk Groovy, at least get your facts straight. Note: Static typing which has existed in Groovy forever.

Static typing (both type-checking and compilation) was added to Groovy for version 2.0 released in June 2012.

No, that is annotations that assists the compiler. In Groovy 1.X I could still write public List mylist = new ArrayList() and it would behave exactly as you would expect.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#57

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Sorry to turn this into a framework war, but as someone who made the move from Groovy/Grails to Scala/Play Framework, I can't imagine ever going back. Or in other words, my answer to "A or B?" is "C".

My experience with Scala Play was very different. Scala is an interminably difficult language fraught with pitfalls. It's much easier to write unreadable Scala code than Groovy.

Agreed. Groovy is in my opinion absolutely the nicest and friendliest language to read or write. Scala has some really cool features that I would love to see in other languages, but it also has a tendency to become somewhat unreadable and is a lot harder to get into when you're new to it.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#58
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 agree that there are a lot of languages that do Groovyish things, and that does make it easier to do without Groovy, but still none of them hits that sweet spot quite the way Groovy does. Groovy is still what I'd like the next version of Java to be.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#59
Understanding this decision requires understanding Pivotal more broadly. EMC (which owns VMWare, which owned Spring) bought Pivotal Labs (primarily a Ruby consultancy) and used the brand for a new spinoff company (Pivotal Software, Inc). That spinoff company received as its founding endowment a hodge-podge of enterprise software technologies they had acquired over the years - Spring, RabbitMQ, CloudFoundry, Greenplum - and the consultancy, which is still called Pivotal Labs. For the most part they put the Ruby consultancy people in charge.

Even though Pivotal Software is an amalgam, Pivotal received most of its culture from Pivotal Labs. To the extent that you can anthropomorphize a corporation, it really, really likes Ruby. Because of CF, it's warming up to Go fast. Spring is too big and important to neglect. But it's hard to see how Groovy/Grails fit into the big picture. It's not in vogue with the top decisionmakers and it's not critical to the business - it's just something that tagged along with Spring. I doubt anyone has any idea what to do with it.

Re: The Groovy project is looking for a new home

#60
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with Scala Play was very different. Scala is an interminably difficult language fraught with pitfalls. It's much easier to write unreadable Scala code than Groovy.

Agreed. Groovy is in my opinion absolutely the nicest and friendliest language to read or write. Scala has some really cool features that I would love to see in other languages, but it also has a tendency to become somewhat unreadable and is a lot harder to get into when you're new to it.

Groovy is gaining popularity among scientists and researchers because of it's ease of use and performance.
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