Hello,
I have been experimenting with the thought of learning an accessible,
reliable and concise scripting language and considered Groovy a worthy
candidate. To decide whether this is the case, I started doing these
little exercises online which usually spawns a lot of micro-questions
that are hard to answer from the docs, no matter that they look alright.
This is where we arrive at the elephant in the room with Groovy: the
striking lack of living, interactive, low-barrier communities.
Groovy might not be a trendy language but it has plenty of visibility
and stakeholders compared to what I was used to with Raku. The big
difference is that Raku has a vivid IRC network, it has a Discord
server, and in addition it also has a blog, a subreddit, a legacy
mailing list, a Mastodon and so on.
Obviously I'm not running around investigating the communities of all
sorts of niche languages but on Discord I've seen servers for languages
from Pascal and Prolog to Factor and Uiua. The older languages usually
have a dedicated IRC channel, some have both. There is also Zig with the
principle of a distributed community which is to my understanding mostly
about allowing and encouraging people to create spaces across various
platforms, with a loose set of rules.
For Groovy, the only real-time platform would be the Slack - if Slack
being a hassle wasn't enough, it's hidden behind a kind of survey that
seems to serve some sort of gatekeeping. There is a semi-active
subreddit and this mailing list. Grails stuff operates under similar
terms, except half dead. It seems clear that this is not how you get
people involved with the language in 2024 - honestly, not even having
good old IRC with a bunch of available people really raises some
questions.
Where is the Groovy community? Is there even one? Who are the target
audience if there is one? Why is there no visible effort to make the
language more accessible to newcomers, some place they could go and
practice? Is it that the people running the business are running out of
motivation or is this Apache project somehow uninterested in extending
the user/contributor base, unlike most indie projects?
I am really curious about an answer because for me these are questions
that determine both the practical feasibility to learn a language and
the overall state and potential of a community.
Sincerely
Martin Burger
- Where do you find a community? Polgár Márton
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