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by guymcarthur 3920 days ago
What was wrong with Groovy?
2 comments

Did you know Groovy was booted off the Codehaus hosting service and its 3 developers retrenched by Pivotal,Inc last January? And Groovy's backup plan to join Apache via its incubator is a hoax, just providing a cover story for a non-technical person to run the show in the background. Virtually all the links at Groovy's page at Apache redirect to "groovy-lang.org", which is privately registered to Registrant Name "Guillaume Laforge" and blank Registrant Organisation. This individual controlling this domain and holding passwords to other non-Apache infrastructure for Groovy is a non-technical person pretending otherwise. Looking at today's emails on the Groovy dev list, we see Cedric Champeau giving two examples of "non code committing" committers, but this Laforge would be a far better example as he doesn't have even one single email in the entire 6-month history of the notifications or commits lists for Groovy at Apache. Until "Apache Software Foundation" is listed as the Organisation, the incubation process isn't real. Even better would be if the technical people who actually built and tested Groovy took over. The only real reason they haven't tried is they know a worse predator lurks over at the Grails ecosystem ready to pounce if Laforge is toppled.
I guess if it wasn't for Google forcing Gradle upon us, Groovy would no longer be relevant.
Groovy's always been good from the very beginning for quick and dirty Java class manipulation, such as test scripts. It found use in Grails when they added a MOP to simulate Rails's ActiveRecord, but Grails is declining quickly -- people aren't starting new projects with it or upgrading to Grails 3.x. Gradle provides it as a configuration language but its typical use is for 30-line build scripts using the declarative DSL only, not the actual language. Gradleware no longer mentions Groovy in any of their promotional blog posts and announcements about Gradle -- it's like they're embarrassed of it -- so I suspect there's changes coming soon in that area.
> Groovy was booted off the Codehaus hosting service

FWIW, codehaus closed down. When was groovy "booted off"?

OK, Groovy wasn't explicitly booted off. But I'm wondering why Codehaus closed down when 5 years ago they were saying Groovy was their most popular project in terms of page accesses and downloads. Weren't the Groovy project team reciprocating the benefits by helping with Codehaus's maintenance?
Why are you so angry ?
You created an anonymous HN user specifically to attack someone's motives instead of discussing the issue of people using the Apache Software Foundation as a cover to hide their effective ownership of some open source software built at other people's time and expense. That's been a common theme from the very people I mentioned.
It was gigantically SLOW from my perspective - was excited when it came out, then noticed it was a magnitude slower for some things.