I can tell you from firsthand experience that this Groovy community has always responded very quickly to questions. I am only a modest level programmer - a C- at best - and the members here have never looked down on any question, and have helped me solve some very challenging ones. I have a lot of respect for the people at groovy.apache.org and nifi.apache.org who have helped me through the years. Any time I've faced a configuration impediment or a coding challenge, they've been there.
On Sun, May 26, 2024 at 8:01 AM OCsite <o...@ocs.cz> wrote: > 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 > > >
