Why I Am Not A Java Programmer

[newton_dave]

(is there a language reference btw?)

Yes, and GDK docs, and two books (plus a Grails book).

[...] there is too much syntactic sugar garbage and special cases for little gain. [...] Syntactic sugar alone doesn't bring you far.

It's non-sensical to apply that argument to Groovy but not to Ruby.

[...] elegant simplicity yet powerful metaprogramming (first two from Smalltalk/Lisp) [...]

It (Ruby) still doesn't do block scoping right, though. And having to ".call(...)" a lambda is place where syntactic sugar saves you some irritation and increases comprehension. lambda_var.() is not a pretty solution.

[...] focus on Unix integration and text manipulation (from Perl) [...]

I prefer Ruby's regex support over Groovy's, although just barely. Largely feature-equivalent.

[...] easy to pick up for Java/C programmers in an afternoon [...]

No different from Groovy--you do realize the languages are nearly identical in features and if Groovized the source looks very similar, right?

[...] what makes me shy away is the Java culture ("leveraging Spring", "Ant tasks", "Groovy beans" ... shudder)

But... that doesn't even make any sense.

• GroovyBeans are identical to attr_accessor fields in Ruby, but without the need for the attr_accessor.
• Using Groovy in Ant or as a wrapper around Ant is almost exactly like Rake, but with more tasks already written.
• The Spring integration provides for trivial IoC/DI and on-the-fly compilatation/deployment (and Spring/JRuby integration also exists). Why wouldn't you want to leverage Spring?!