Occasional Thoughts

Well, not exactly - in fact they have just announced their support for Python and Jython. I am just asking myself how long it takes for Sun until they are no longer able to ignore Groovy. The last thing I would like to do is to do Ruby or Python bashing... both are great languages and have proven their usefulness. Ruby/JRuby gained pretty much interest at JAX 2008 - there was a dedicated Ruby day. Python has itself proven as scripting language for various KDE applications and Jython can be found in some commercial Java products for scripting.

However it is also a fact that Groovy became very popular in a very short time and I find it very astonishing that Sun seems to ignore it. It's even more astonishing since Groovy as way closer to Java than any other of the scripting languages and therefore more natural to Java programmers. This makes Groovy an ideal choice for the fluid glue layer in projects, where most developers are Java experts with little knowledge of other scripting languages.

One reason I read was that Sun does not want to support Groovy since it does not see a growing market here, as Groovy is pretty much supported by other IDEs already. The fact is that IntelliJ is the only IDE with reasonable Groovy support currently. And IntelliJ is not free. There is also a plugin for Eclips, but this is very rudimentary.

So this is a bad excuse in my eyes.

Therefore I asked myself what Sun is going to do, when they have covered all other dynamic languages for the JVM? Invent JCobol?

But to be fair - there may be a silver lining at the horizont: Netbeans 6.5 is supposed to have Groovy and Grails support built in.

On the other side here are some excerpts from an older Sun article about Groovy (May 2005) - I am sure that the statements contained therein are no longer true today and I have teared them out of context, however they sound somewhat funny today:

"A common question when someone first hears about Groovy is, why bother with another scripting language for the Java platform?"

"From a language perspective, the feature set looks like when "Java" was first announced back in 1995, a list of the latest buzz-words of the day:"

"Scripting languages for the Java platform seem to appear every once in a while. How long they last one can never know, until they've been around for awhile. Whether Groovy will survive, only time will tell."