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> Working with JSON never takes longer than it should. This is the key point right here. JSON is a big reason I love groovy so much. No matter what json you

> Working with JSON never takes longer than it should. This is the key point right here. JSON is a big reason I love groovy so much. No matter what json you have in groovy, you are a couple lines of code and a couple closures away from doing anything. I always use json string payloads on HTTP aswell. It vastly simplifies rest service development. Another thing I love about json is using it with cassandra. So easy to store big maps that hold the state of different things. Dont even get me started on avro/kafka/etc....

taeric 8y ago
You would have loved s-expressions in a typical lisp setup, then. :) And you have also obviously never fallen victim to slightly off spec JSON parsers and folks that took advantage of them. Trailing commas? Definitely useful. Until they break a system. (Oddly, I have been stricken lately by how much people hate the extra parens of lisp, but nobody bats an eye at the pointless commas of every other language...)
- TuringTest 8y ago
  That may be because you don't need to keep track of how many commas are there, you can just throw them in wherever you need one. Yet parentheses must always come in pairs, you need a pair for every term in the program (brackets are only needed for full statements), and they tend to pile down at the end of complex functions and data structures.
  - taeric 8y ago
    I have seen more than my fair share of build failures from missing or extra commas. Worse, they have odd behavior in some languages. That said, I cede that they are different. I just don't get the hate of parens.
    - sli 8y ago
      My frontend builds fail because of trailing commas in the code (by design, so technically a non-issue). At the same time, my editors can balance parens but they can't really do anything but complain about trailing commas. It can't assume it's an issue and "fix" it because I just might not be done writing, yet. My editor can make more and safer assumptions about paren balancing, however, and so it does. I really have no horse in this race, neither of these things bother me. I just can't help but notice that the paren problem in particular can be easily rectified.
      - TuringTest 8y ago
        Yeah, I concur. I mean, instances have a "global stream" where all posts from all users are sent? What's the use for that? It would be like Facebook or Twitter having a "front page" showing all posts from all their users. I don't want to read what something posted merely because they're subscribed to the same physical server. There should be some classification of affinity by common interests.
- jcelerier 8y ago
  > (Oddly, I have been stricken lately by how much people hate the extra parens of lisp, but nobody bats an eye at the pointless commas of every other language...) I just checked an a comma is a grand total of three filled pixels on my coding font in my screen while a parenthese is 12 pixels. Parentheses are freakin visual bloat. Just look at this : https://i.imgur.com/UTGjbI5.png https://i.imgur.com/UTGjbI5.png
  - chriswarbo 8y ago
    I think that's a poor reason to choose a concrete syntax, and if it really bothers you it's easy enough to have your machine display them however you want. For example, I use https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DimParentheses https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DimParentheses to make parentheses unobtrusive. I sometimes want to see them if they're at my cursor position, so I use https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ShowParenMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ShowParenMode to highlight that one and its corresponding opener/closer. I use https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit to automatically keep parens/quotes/etc. balanced, move around whole subexpressions, etc. I'm sure there are similar tools for different editors (e.g. there's an incomplete list at https://github.com/shaunlebron/history-of-lisp-parens/blob/master/editors.md https://github.com/shaunlebron/history-of-lisp-parens/blob/m... ) There's a screenshot of this setup at http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-08-29-s_expressions.html http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-08-29-s_expressions.html
  - kazinator 8y ago
    > Parentheses are freakin visual bloat. Just look at this: https://i.imgur.com/UTGjbI5.png https://i.imgur.com/UTGjbI5.png Not to mention that f and 0. We should write in Braille; f is just three dots and so is 0. Bonus: they are similar. Note that parentheses do something, whereas commas are purely gratuitous. You can't just remove the inner parentheses in (1 2 (3 4) 5) without replacing them with something else. (1, 2, (3, 4), 5) is just stupid though.
gaius 8y ago
Ah, Groovy. All the brevity of Java and all the type safety of JavaScript. I had no idea anyone still used it, let alone loved it!
- zmmmmm 8y ago
  Pretty much wrong on all counts - doesn't sound like you know very much about groovy at all?
  - gaius 8y ago
    Have unfortunately had to use it as it was the scripting language embedded in an application we used. Now I avoid it whenever possible. Even BeanShell was better!
- rhencke 8y ago
  That's an unfortunate stance on Groovy. Groovy code is often far more brief than Java's, and it has some beautifully expressive capability for making DSLs, both through its world-view on closures and its ability for the developer to walk and modify the AST at compile time (see, for example, the @Canonical attribute for how this can be useful) While I, too, wish it built on a statically typed base, Groovy offers amenities such as @CompileStatic that go a long way towards alleviating this. I personally find Kotlin strikes a wonderful spot with the brevity and expressiveness of Groovy, while managing to be more type-safe than Java (reified generics, null safety in the type system). But there is no denying Groovy's heavy influence on Kotlin, either. Groovy may not be perfect but I don't think the picture you paint is accurate, either.
  - vorg 8y ago
    If you need to use the JVM ... > walk and modify the AST at compile time Clojure is best for this. A macro only a few lines long in Clojure will do the same as what a few hundred lines in Apache Groovy are required for. It's possible to walk the AST in Groovy but it's verbose and messy. > CompileStatic that go a long way Both Kotlin and Scala are both statically typed from the ground up, instead of having a @CompileStatic annotation tacked on later. > the brevity and expressiveness of Groovy Groovy started off in 2003 as a functionally similar clone of Beanshell, which had already existed since 1999, but with closures added. Someone then translated all the standard functional methods from Ruby into Groovy's codebase. Of course, Jython, a JVM version of Python, has been around since 1997. So Groovy is a relative late comer to the JVM in this regard. Groovy tried to be a bit of everything for everyone on the JVM, but has ended up being used only for 20-line build scripts in Gradle.

taeric 8y ago

You would have loved s-expressions in a typical lisp setup, then. :) And you have also obviously never fallen victim to slightly off spec JSON parsers and folks that took advantage of them. Trailing commas? Definitely useful. Until they break a system. (Oddly, I have been stricken lately by how much people hate the extra parens of lisp, but nobody bats an eye at the pointless commas of every other language...)

TuringTest 8y ago
That may be because you don't need to keep track of how many commas are there, you can just throw them in wherever you need one. Yet parentheses must always come in pairs, you need a pair for every term in the program (brackets are only needed for full statements), and they tend to pile down at the end of complex functions and data structures.
- taeric 8y ago
  I have seen more than my fair share of build failures from missing or extra commas. Worse, they have odd behavior in some languages. That said, I cede that they are different. I just don't get the hate of parens.
  - sli 8y ago
    My frontend builds fail because of trailing commas in the code (by design, so technically a non-issue). At the same time, my editors can balance parens but they can't really do anything but complain about trailing commas. It can't assume it's an issue and "fix" it because I just might not be done writing, yet. My editor can make more and safer assumptions about paren balancing, however, and so it does. I really have no horse in this race, neither of these things bother me. I just can't help but notice that the paren problem in particular can be easily rectified.
    - TuringTest 8y ago
      Yeah, I concur. I mean, instances have a "global stream" where all posts from all users are sent? What's the use for that? It would be like Facebook or Twitter having a "front page" showing all posts from all their users. I don't want to read what something posted merely because they're subscribed to the same physical server. There should be some classification of affinity by common interests.
jcelerier 8y ago
> (Oddly, I have been stricken lately by how much people hate the extra parens of lisp, but nobody bats an eye at the pointless commas of every other language...) I just checked an a comma is a grand total of three filled pixels on my coding font in my screen while a parenthese is 12 pixels. Parentheses are freakin visual bloat. Just look at this : https://i.imgur.com/UTGjbI5.png https://i.imgur.com/UTGjbI5.png
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  I think that's a poor reason to choose a concrete syntax, and if it really bothers you it's easy enough to have your machine display them however you want. For example, I use https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DimParentheses https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/DimParentheses to make parentheses unobtrusive. I sometimes want to see them if they're at my cursor position, so I use https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ShowParenMode https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ShowParenMode to highlight that one and its corresponding opener/closer. I use https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit to automatically keep parens/quotes/etc. balanced, move around whole subexpressions, etc. I'm sure there are similar tools for different editors (e.g. there's an incomplete list at https://github.com/shaunlebron/history-of-lisp-parens/blob/master/editors.md https://github.com/shaunlebron/history-of-lisp-parens/blob/m... ) There's a screenshot of this setup at http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-08-29-s_expressions.html http://chriswarbo.net/blog/2017-08-29-s_expressions.html
- kazinator 8y ago
  > Parentheses are freakin visual bloat. Just look at this: https://i.imgur.com/UTGjbI5.png https://i.imgur.com/UTGjbI5.png Not to mention that f and 0. We should write in Braille; f is just three dots and so is 0. Bonus: they are similar. Note that parentheses do something, whereas commas are purely gratuitous. You can't just remove the inner parentheses in (1 2 (3 4) 5) without replacing them with something else. (1, 2, (3, 4), 5) is just stupid though.

gaius 8y ago

Ah, Groovy. All the brevity of Java and all the type safety of JavaScript. I had no idea anyone still used it, let alone loved it!

zmmmmm 8y ago
Pretty much wrong on all counts - doesn't sound like you know very much about groovy at all?
- gaius 8y ago
  Have unfortunately had to use it as it was the scripting language embedded in an application we used. Now I avoid it whenever possible. Even BeanShell was better!
rhencke 8y ago
That's an unfortunate stance on Groovy. Groovy code is often far more brief than Java's, and it has some beautifully expressive capability for making DSLs, both through its world-view on closures and its ability for the developer to walk and modify the AST at compile time (see, for example, the @Canonical attribute for how this can be useful) While I, too, wish it built on a statically typed base, Groovy offers amenities such as @CompileStatic that go a long way towards alleviating this. I personally find Kotlin strikes a wonderful spot with the brevity and expressiveness of Groovy, while managing to be more type-safe than Java (reified generics, null safety in the type system). But there is no denying Groovy's heavy influence on Kotlin, either. Groovy may not be perfect but I don't think the picture you paint is accurate, either.
- vorg 8y ago
  If you need to use the JVM ... > walk and modify the AST at compile time Clojure is best for this. A macro only a few lines long in Clojure will do the same as what a few hundred lines in Apache Groovy are required for. It's possible to walk the AST in Groovy but it's verbose and messy. > CompileStatic that go a long way Both Kotlin and Scala are both statically typed from the ground up, instead of having a @CompileStatic annotation tacked on later. > the brevity and expressiveness of Groovy Groovy started off in 2003 as a functionally similar clone of Beanshell, which had already existed since 1999, but with closures added. Someone then translated all the standard functional methods from Ruby into Groovy's codebase. Of course, Jython, a JVM version of Python, has been around since 1997. So Groovy is a relative late comer to the JVM in this regard. Groovy tried to be a bit of everything for everyone on the JVM, but has ended up being used only for 20-line build scripts in Gradle.