Am 09.10.2015 um 19:30 schrieb Owen Rubel:
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'??
The funny thing is, they never ask why he would have not created Groovy if he had known Groovy. It's because making a language is hard work, and it is much better to lean back and let others do the job.
And I am not only talking about coding work. You have to fight language trolls all the time. People that say programming language is rubbish because of one small feature... Like some say C is bad, because it evals an int 0 to the boolean false.
I always feel that James is the type that likes to test things out and go from one new thing to the next. Someone that likes challenges. But that type also often has a problem finishing things. A programming language takes years to develop. That's normally too long for that type. Other new cool things pop up and take attention. Also having a small team develop a language is quite the time consuming job. And a lot of that is not programming, but discussion. That's also not for that type. I very well remember that first time I attended a Groovy developers meeting.... that have been heated discussions back then. Today this works entirely different.
To me it is no wonder James left after he did see things can go on without him.
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.
He did a lot of work for early Groovy - so you can't say he wasn't that involved. He was one of the driving forces of early Groovy times. But that was, about 1-2 years? And we are talking here about 11 years in total and I think 2 years before Groovy 1.0
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).
Here you are: http://macstrac.blogspot.de/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-replacement-for.html
[...] bye blackdrag -- Jochen "blackdrag" Theodorou blog: http://blackdragsview.blogspot.com/
