[ebiester]

Don't most people in the JVM ecosystem know about groovy by now? I first heard about it when Maven 2 betas were coming out and it was the preferred way to write a plugin.

[babs474]

I find awareness of groovy very spotty depending on the crowd you travel in.

Enterprisey J2EE people regard it as a new fangled something they don't have time for.

More pragmatic, hip to it programmers seem to give more attention to scala, clojure, jruby.

[pjmlp]

> Enterprisey J2EE people regard it as a new fangled something they don't have time for.

Back when I was part of a project that was developing a JSF framework on top of RichFaces, I started pushing for Groovy support on our SDK.

This was 2009, Groovy was everywhere on JUG talks in Germany, most talking about Grails success stories. On the same year while attending JSF Days in Austria there were some Oracle guys showing how to do JSF applications in Groovy and the possible inclusion the the next J2EE revision.

Other team on the same company was replacing the Perl battle tested installation scripts by Groovy ones.

Nowadays, if it wasn't for Android Studio and its dependency on Gradle, I would hardly notice its use.

[narrator]

Groovy's problem is that it's very slow compared to Java. http://java.dzone.com/articles/java-7-vs-groovy-21

[mindcrime]

I guess I fall somewhere in between then. :-)

Our startup is writing "enterprisey" B2B knowledge management software, but almost all of our code is written in Groovy. But I'm "hip to it" enough to at least own several Clojure and Scala books and have both on my "to learn" list. shrug

Personally I'm a big fan of Groovy. It gets an awful lot of things right, IMO. The syntax is mostly a superset of plain Java, but a lot of things that are required in Java are optional in Groovy. But Groovy is dynamic and has meta-programming, closures, dynamic typing, etc. For my money, it really hits the sweet spot. Easy to learn for a Java person, but way more productive than Java.

[babs474]

>Easy to learn for a Java person, but way more productive than Java.

Agreed, which is why it such a shame it isn't more prevalent.

Along with the features you mention, I'll add, good repl support, which is a must for modern languages in my book and is a huge productivity boost.

[DigitalJack]

Names do have some importance. Calling your programming language Groovy is like calling it "Sweet Hotness." Nobody wants to explain to their boss that they think they should write something in Sweet Hotness, and likewise Groovy.

[caoilte]

I guess you never had the "We're switching from SVN to git" conversation.

[smrtinsert]

as another "enterprisey" type I vastly prefer clojure or scala. either go full on static typing or full expressivness. groovy is too middle of the road for me.