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im curious what people dislike about groovy. I haven't tried it much but it seemed like a decent language and good alternative to java. I wasn't thrilled with

im curious what people dislike about groovy. I haven't tried it much but it seemed like a decent language and good alternative to java. I wasn't thrilled with the availability of frameworks for it, but that was about the only complaint I really had.

edtechdev 13y ago
I don't dislike groovy - I remember studying the compiler 8 years ago (I was helping work on the boo compiler at the time). But every programming language I've ever seen has flaws - that are both objective and subjective. If I were a Ruby developer wanting to create something on the JVM, I might think that groovy is inferior to JRuby, for example. If I were a straight up Java developer, I might think that groovy is slow or inconsistent or too unsafe (how some people perceive ruby's monkey patching). I'm not saying any of those perceptions are correct, but it is very easy to imagine all kinds of reasons and perspectives for disliking every single language up there. Heck, for about a third of them, it's harder for me to imagine reasons that people DO like them. But I know that's just my opinion, man, and who I am to stop people from using drugs, jumping off cliffs, or using Perl.
kbd 13y ago
I'm also surprised at the dislike for Groovy. When I looked at it, it seemed to be roughly on par with Python or Ruby, with some nice features unique to Groovy. Of course, there's the limitation that it only runs on the JVM. Maybe it suffers from the following thought process: many people who want a rapid development language and would be interested in Python or Ruby aren't interested in running on the JVM, and people who are already in the Java ecosystem are too biased in favor of static typing to give Groovy its fair shake?
- netcraft 13y ago
  perhaps. I was interested in it because the jvm is appealing to me (performance and the sheer volume of available, tested libraries), but I dont want to write java boilerplate and groovy seems to have some cool dynamic language features.

edtechdev 13y ago

I don't dislike groovy - I remember studying the compiler 8 years ago (I was helping work on the boo compiler at the time). But every programming language I've ever seen has flaws - that are both objective and subjective. If I were a Ruby developer wanting to create something on the JVM, I might think that groovy is inferior to JRuby, for example. If I were a straight up Java developer, I might think that groovy is slow or inconsistent or too unsafe (how some people perceive ruby's monkey patching). I'm not saying any of those perceptions are correct, but it is very easy to imagine all kinds of reasons and perspectives for disliking every single language up there. Heck, for about a third of them, it's harder for me to imagine reasons that people DO like them. But I know that's just my opinion, man, and who I am to stop people from using drugs, jumping off cliffs, or using Perl.

kbd 13y ago

I'm also surprised at the dislike for Groovy. When I looked at it, it seemed to be roughly on par with Python or Ruby, with some nice features unique to Groovy. Of course, there's the limitation that it only runs on the JVM. Maybe it suffers from the following thought process: many people who want a rapid development language and would be interested in Python or Ruby aren't interested in running on the JVM, and people who are already in the Java ecosystem are too biased in favor of static typing to give Groovy its fair shake?

netcraft 13y ago
perhaps. I was interested in it because the jvm is appealing to me (performance and the sheer volume of available, tested libraries), but I dont want to write java boilerplate and groovy seems to have some cool dynamic language features.