> Perhaps they groovy or scala You're using Apache Groovy as a counter-example to PHP blowing? Groovy's the PHP equivalent in the JVM world, the sloppy partner

> Perhaps they groovy or scala You're using Apache Groovy as a counter-example to PHP blowing? Groovy's the PHP equivalent in the JVM world, the sloppy partner to the more exacting Scala, Clojure, and Kotlin. Since its first release in late 2003, Groovy's been extended and repurposed so many times it's not really one unified language anymore. The MOP stuff was added for Grails in 2006, the half-baked types when generics were added in v 1.5, the pluggable annotations in v 1.6, the command syntax in v 1.7 to appeal make Gradle builds look nicer, the static typing in 2.0, traits in 2.2, the unsuccessful switch to Android deliverables after that, with backwards incompatibilities between minor versions. And then there's the stuff that silently got dropped, like interceptors and empty try statements. Groovy's OK for quick'n'dirties scripting Java classes and defining builds, but for actually building systems use a language built from the ground up for that purpose, e.g. Java, Scala, or Kotlin.