Martin, I'd say the community is right here. Whenever I needed a help and neither the (excellent, in my opinion) documentation nor sites like Groovy Goodness (mrhaki, definitely worth checking whenever in doubt) helped, I've asked here, and almost always I've got helpful and very knowledgeable answers.
I would hate it if I had to use something with a terrible GUI like the Discord thing instead of a convenient, practical and nice maillist. Besides a maillist is conceptually worlds better than any kind of IRC for these things, for it sort of endorses thinking through before sending; both your questions and the answers tend to be well formulated, while IRCs endorse the very opposite. Even if there was an |RC with a good GUI — so far, I haven't seen one, but well, in theory such thing might exist — I'd still strongly prefer a maillist. I suggest you try to ask those questions you need help with here and see whether you find this list as excellent for learning Groovy and as helpful as I did. All the best, OC > On 26. 5. 2024, at 4:13, Polgár Márton <ersterpleghth...@gmail.com> wrote: > > 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
