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I've been a bit annoyed at Roo - more precisely, Spring, because they seem to give Roo more love/attention than Grails. Personally, yes, I think perhaps it was a bit 'dumb' of you to dismiss Groovy. ;) Yes, it's 'syntactical sugar', but having that in Java is great. You can say 'hack' or whatever, but it's still effective and bringing productivity and reduced boilerplate to otherwise plain-old Java. Scala and Clojure - I've nothing against them, except that they do seem to split the attention on 'alternative JVM' languages. That dilution hurts the chances of any one platform taking hold as the 'next thing' in the Java world, and personally, right now, most of my eggs are in the GR8 world, for many reasons. I do think Scala is different enough from traditional Java development that broad migration from existing Java developers won't happen, whereas Groovy is so potentially similar that there's little reason for an existing Java dev to have trouble adding Groovy as they learn it. It's not an 'all or nothing' proposition. If you have any further interest in Groovy/Grails and have any questions, I'd be happy to help if I can - email me directly if you want. |
I agree with your views regarding Scala. It's a really interesting language with a ton of cool concepts, but I fear it might be "too powerful" for the "standard entreprise Java programmers". Java is good, because it is simple. With Scala, you use different paradigms, which might be harder to grasp. It's easier to shoot yourself in the foot / write complicated code. But I guess that's the price to pay for using a high level programming language?
Here is Martin Odersky's take on this debate: http://lamp.epfl.ch/~odersky/blogs/isscalacomplex.html
Gosu also looks interesting as a Groovy contender, though you won't like it, since it dilutes the alternative JVM languages even more ;) http://gosu-lang.org/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1881924