I'm not sure whether that post is a direct repost (because it references Programming in Scala, which appears to be published in 2008), in either case the posts I've read I don't quite see it as a "Groovy sucks no one should use it", but that had he realized there were good-enough alternatives for him at the time he wouldn't have gone through the effort of making Groovy. Groovy has evolved a lot since that time and also has optionally static typing now which wasn't even planned then, so the comment doesn't apply now. Even if it did, I wouldn't say it's necessarily a negative for Groovy. I might say something like "had I known about AngularJS when I started learning JavaFX, I never would have learned JavaFX", which for me is a true statement but being different domains it says nothing bad about JavaFX, in fact it's by far the best UI framework for Java but I found Angular more universal and easier to deploy in use cases relevant to me.
Jason From: Keith Suderman [mailto:suder...@anc.org] Sent: Friday, October 09, 2015 4:05 PM To: users@groovy.incubator.apache.org Subject: Re: A Brief History of Groovy On Oct 9, 2015, at 12:03 PM, Owen Rubel <oru...@gmail.com<mailto:oru...@gmail.com>> wrote: no that wasnt it... it was in 2005 on his now defunct blog. I think that is just a reposting of the original article to his new blog. At least it contains the "famous quote". However, when people mention the quote to me I respond with, "Thank goodness he hadn't know about Scala." Scala may be a great language, but for me what makes Groovy the hands down winner is syntax; being able to rename a .java file to .groovy and have it be 99% correct (often 100%) is a huge benefit. Of course Java and Groovy syntax have started to diverge, but I always get the feeling that in some places Scala changes the syntax just to be contrary. Keith But yes. Seeing it now through different eyes, I feel for him but I also feel for the group for having to make rough decisions. It's never easy for people to have to do those things and its never easy for someone to let go of something they created. Perhaps James saying 'Groovy is crap' helps him to let go of it psychologically... which is a great way to help him heal and I'm sure he is past that alot by now. We all have hurt and we just have to rise above it and be introspective and look inside ourselves and try to see what we can learn and derive from it. In reading that conversation, I learned alot about what happened and I guess about myself too. It was very eye opening in how mature every one was... made me feel like I had alot to learn. I just thought it a nice restrospect on the leadership and how they weathered hard times together... not a pointing of a finger at an individual who reacted in a moment of weakness. Otherwise I would spend most of the time pointing at myself. Owen Rubel 415-971-0976 oru...@gmail.com<mailto:oru...@gmail.com> On Fri, Oct 9, 2015 at 11:39 AM, Jochen Theodorou <blackd...@gmx.org<mailto:blackd...@gmx.org>> wrote: 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/ ------------------------------ Research Associate Department of Computer Science Vassar College Poughkeepsie, NY ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This email message and any attachments are for the sole use of the intended recipient(s). Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message and any attachments.
