[pjmlp]

Groovy had Netbeans and Eclipse support, which was dropped when it started fading away.

We move in different worlds, no InteliJ installations around here.

I remember when Groovy was popular, with every JUG in Germany having weekly talks and Sun talking how the next JEE revision would support Groovy for writing beans.

Popularity doesn't write software.

[coldtea]

>Groovy had Netbeans and Eclipse support, which was dropped when it started fading away.

I know, I've used it. What I said is that it did not have the first class IDE attention of a major vendor, those were mostly third party sub-par plugins compared to the Java focus of those IDEs. For Kotlin, however, it was first class IDE support as a primary concern from the start.

>We move in different worlds, no InteliJ installations around here.

Then we indeed move in different worlds.

>Popularity doesn't write software.

No, its just the only thing that matters when it comes to get paid for it.

[pjmlp]

Delivering working software as per customer's RFP is what matters, everything else is fluff.

[olavgg]

I don't understand how Groovy is fading away when it is getting more and more popular. Groovy is also very similar to Java. There is no learning curve, you are immediately creating value.

[pjmlp]

More popular where?

Had it not been for Google's adoption of Gradle for Android and it would have been left for Grails maintenance projects.

And even then, the pressure for perfomance has been so much that it is being superceded by a Kotlin based DSL.

How to improve Gradle has been a common talk at every Android conference since Android Studio has been introduced.

[olavgg]

Everywhere?

Google Trends says Groovy is just as popular as it was 10 years ago. The number of downloads has increased significantly but it is not because of Gradle, as Gradle bundles Groovy. It is also currently placed #16. on TIOBE Index

And last, Groovy with compile static is in most cases, just as fast and memory efficient as Java.

Some people always talk down Groovy, yet the numbers speak for them self. Before Kotlin, Groovy was attacked by Scala developers.

The major thing Groovy has over both Scala and Kotlin is strong similarity to Java syntax which makes the learning curve non-existing. And that is a bigger deal than a random cryptic/confusing programming expression. Code readability is very important.

[vorg]

> Some people always talk down Groovy, yet the numbers speak for them self

Many of those numbers are fake. Groovy was #70 on the Tiobe index only 12 months ago, see [1], but is #16 now. How do you explain that? Groovy was last in Tiobe's top 20 about 2 years ago when the search numbers for "Groovy" from Baidu were hugely incorrect. Groovy later quickly dropped back out of the top 50.

[1] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/groovy/

[pjmlp]

Certainly not in Germany where it vanished from JUGs.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=%2Fm%2F07sbkfb,%2...

Java worldwide average 86%

Groovy worldwide average 2%

Pretty popular indeed.

[pjmlp]

"Cédric Champeau: Goodbye, Groovy!"

https://melix.github.io/blog/2019/03/goodbye-groovy.html