[lmm]

There has been an... unfortunate community attitude. Some people were quite unwelcoming to newcomers. I think this is down to two individuals; nowadays many friendlier folks are writing Scala libraries and hopefully the community will improve.

I get the sense the Java community is also unused to interacting with other languages, because for a long time the JVM was a world unto itself. Most languages have a spectrum of "neighbour" languages and so users are used to working with at least slightly different alternatives. Scala is possibly Java's closest neighbour (Groovy is not really popular enough to show up on the radar of most Java devs) and it's become something very different, so there's a real culture shock just trying to talk to each other. A lot of Scala folks take a lot of assumptions for granted that are very alien to Java folks.

None of which really takes away from the language itself, if you're willing to learn on your own or tolerate a few insults when you ask for help. IMO it is very much worth it: Scala is genuinely the best practical language available today (it has more than its fair share of warts but they're mostly for JVM/Java compatibility, which makes it so much easier to introduce to business than e.g. Haskell).

[muraiki]

I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but every time I've asked a question in #scala I've received nothing but helpful and welcoming responses.

[lmm]

Most of the time that's what you'll get. But there are (or at least were when last I was there) two or three people who will respond unpleasantly, and I want to be honest about that.

[nrinaudo]

Is this why I don't see you there anymore? This has in my opinion made #scala a markedly less pleasant place to hang out.

[lmm]

Thanks, and sorry to be absent. That's more about work circumstances; it's been an awkward month or so, and I do intend to come back once things shake themselves out.

[facorreia]

This has also been my experience in Stack Overflow and in the Play Framework user group.

[yarper]

I'm a professional java dev - groovy definitely does show up on our radar as it's used as the glue for a lot of tools related to our "production" code.

For example gradle buildscripts are groovy, as is the spock test framework.

[vorg]

Groovy is to the JVM what Bash is to Linux. It's used for writing quick and short scripts that manipulate Java classes and for building them, but you wouldn't use it to write actual systems despite the static typing features made available in Groovy 2.x. Use Java or Scala for that. But even Gradle's use of Groovy is in question -- Gradleware just employed one of the 2 Groovy developers who became unemployed after VMWare's Pivotal stopped funding Groovy last month. I suspect Gradleware will get him to replace the Groovy monstrosity with their own lightweight version of the language which does what a build DSL needs and not much more. This could be a reaction against Grails 3.0, a 130Mb download released alongside Grails 2.5 last month, bundling Gradle in an apparent attempt to take control of its distribution channel, in the same way they bundled Spring with Grails 1.0 back in 2008 then got their company bought out by Spring later that year. When a language's development is driven more by corporate maneuvering than providing functionality for a particular purpose then would you even trust it for scripting? Perhaps look at Xtend or Clojure!

You can read the other unemployed developer's take on Groovy's development history at http://blackdragsview.blogspot.com/2015/04/about-being-paid-...

[lmm]

Plenty of Java shops use it, but plenty don't. My impression is that most people who are aware of Groovy will also be aware of Scala, whereas there are a lot of Java developers for whom Scala is the only "other JVM language" that they've heard of. But that's just my experience.