[gr8ful]

I've been monitoring adoption for some time. There was a (roughly) three+ year period where Groovy was the fastest growing language in the world. Scala has seen more growth over the past year, but IMHO it will never challenge Groovy. Why? Functional languages have been around for years and have never owned more than a niche market due to their complexity. Groovy is more readable than Java, and much more readable then Scala or Closure.

Remember COBOL dominated the US for many years due to it's simplicity. PowerBuilder beat a more comprehensive competitor (SQL Windows) due to it's simplicity. It seems likely that functional languages may find a niche where they fit well (e.g. business rules) but languages like Groovy seem most likely to achieve wide adoption. IMHO of course!

[zmmmmm]

> Functional languages have been around for years and have never owned more than a niche market due to their complexity

I think the problem is that writing in a functional way almost requires a purist approach, so the only way in is to completely buy into the "dogma" of it. That makes adoption hard to impossible.

Groovy is almost completely the opposite - every practical whim is catered for, almost to a fault - there's all kinds of crazy stuff shoved into it. But boy is it easy to adopt. It's a quite stunning achievement how much is in Groovy and yet still - it remains almost source compatible with Java.

[soc88]

It's funny how that "functional" name calling appears so convenient if it fits the own argumentation. (Not considering that Scala is foremost an object-oriented language.)

Groovy is trying to play catch-up with Java currently (typing-wise) and I don't see how they will implement a modern type system in the next decade with the amount of cruft they have accumulated since Groovy's inception.

Additionally, Java 8 will ship with closures, so I'm not seeing where a niche for Groovy will remain.

[nithril]

As for scala.