I write a few articles about Groovy and every now and then I have a Scala fanatic through the James Strachan quote in my face. You know the one? The one where he is quoted on a Scala blog saying how if he had known about Scala when he was writing Groovy, he would have never created it'??
I always like to say to people that he wasn't that involved with the project and he left early on... but I always wanted to know what happened. And the truth would make you so proud of your current leaders that I had to share. Apparently as the team was pushing to hit their 1.0 launch, James was dragging his feet and there was some pushback (at least from what I can tell). This all came to a head when James published an article on his blog entitled 'Groovy is Dead' (article not available - if someone has this, I would LOVE to read). The community response? Calm, cool, collected. Some even considered the response as positive feedback for the project. Others defended him and said that it was unfair to ask him to leave the project. All in all, I was amazed to see the level of cool heads to the kind of attack that was leveled at a project that was still 'alpha'. http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.groovy.jsr/month=20050101 As we all know, Guillaume took over the project and has been a stellar leader since then. This was his initial post on the matter showing his leadership skills even back then... http://glaforge.appspot.com/article/groovy-s-dead-long-live-groovy Why do I bring this up? Two reason... to understand the day to day of what our leaders go through and to understand that we ALL have the ability to be 'James' I realize myself in reading that that there are people who want me to do well, that want me to succeed in spite of myself. There will always be those who will be naysayers out there but for the few who believe you have something, do it for them... rise to the occassion. If you can stay afloat, tomorrow may bring 2.0 of your life! So with that... the next time someone tells you that quote oj James Strachan know two things: James was probably still upset and Scala appeals to a different group of people. Also remember how our current leaders didn't falter and rose to the occasion. And let that smile comes to mind whenever those Scala guys try to bring you down. :) Owen Rubel 415-971-0976 oru...@gmail.com
