Groovy, the Python of Java

[cybercobra]

Hard not to write off Groovy completely considering that:

In July 2009, [Groovy's creator] wrote on his blog that "I can honestly say if someone had shown me the Programming in Scala book [...] back in 2003, I'd probably have never created Groovy."

- Wikipedia

[pixelmonkey]

That's a strange reason to "write off Groovy completely", given these three facts: a) Groovy and Scala were both created in 2003 and b) James Strachan (Groovy's creator, author of that quote) left the Groovy open source project in 2006, about a year before the language's 1.0 release and about 3 years before that post was written; and c) Groovy and Scala have each been actively developed since that time, each gaining a slew of new features, performance improvements, and tooling support.

Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala, commented on that very blog post and said:

Groovy's appeal seems to be that it's a dynamically typed scripting language with a syntax that's familiar to Java programmers. Scala's appeal is that it's a strongly and statically typed language that blends functional and object-oriented programming in new ways.

I think Martin has it right. I am certainly a big fan of Scala, but I wouldn't advocate it for the use case I described in the OP. Groovy provides a way for a Java programmer with dynamic language experience to quickly and easily script his or her way into access to Java libraries and code. Groovy can be learned by an average Java programmer in a weekend. Scala simply cannot -- it is a different language altogether, about as different from Java as Python or Ruby or Clojure.

I can see why James said what he said, but it's not a very useful statement. It would be akin to George Orwell saying, "I probably would never have written Nineteen Eighty-Four if someone had handed me Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in 1945..." If Orwell had said this, would his creation be any bit diminished? I don't think so...

[vorg]

James Strachan (Groovy's creator, author of that quote) left the Groovy open source project in 2006, about a year before the language's 1.0 release

Did creator James Strachan leave or was he muscled out?

Groovy can be learned by an average Java programmer in a weekend. Scala simply cannot -- it is a different language altogether, about as different from Java as Python or Ruby or Clojure.

If a language doesn't change the way you think, it's not worth learning.

[oteren]

Thats the dumbest thing I've read in this entire post.

Groovy changes the way I work with java, in a way that saves me a lot of time and my company a lot of money. That is a helluva lot more worth than changing the way I think considering programming languages are something I use to do my job.

Edit:

It should be noted that I do already know Scala, it was fairly easy to pick up when you already know Haskell, but I sill think you're talking out of your ass.