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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

I agree with what a number of others have said here: Java isn't ideal for front-end web stuff, but it still has a lot of uses for low level data processing and back-end work. Also, the JVM is a great platform, and you can target it with any number of languages: Groovy, Clojure, Scala, Nice, JRuby, Jython, etc.

Personally I'm using Groovy on Grails for the web front-end part(s) of my current project, and even using Groovy for some of the "backend'ish" parts just to get through the initial prototype. Grails and Groovy are amazing in terms of developer speed - compared to Java anyway. But since it's all still on the JVM, I can just drop in existing Java libraries and - if, or when - I need to, it'll be fairly easy to transition bits to Java. For my money, it's the best of both worlds at the moment.

Then again, the stuff I'm doing is somewhat "enterprisey" so being on the JVM will probably actually be a selling point down the road.

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another groovy on grails fan here... I wish more people would give it a try.. its surprisingly expressive like ruby or python , scales with the JVM, backing of all currently java libs, and great web framework like rails.

This may sound ignorant, but if you're going to use another JVM language, why not use JRuby (if you want to stick with a Smalltalk/Modula-3 derivative), Clojure (if you like Lisp and want STM) or Scala (if you want the static type checking, speed, built in support in IntelliJ)?

This is a serious question: several people I respect (who are smarter than me and thus well capable of learning new languages) are using Groovy for their projects and I am wondering why?

well the main reason I wouldn't use JRuby is because .. by programming in just Ruby, you get benefit of all the c extensions that you aren't able to use in JRuby and not sure about rails support on jruby. I would just use it without jvm. The other reason to go with groovy/grails is the grails plugins community is very active.

Well, Groovy has been around longer than Clojure, IIRC, and maybe longer than Scala, or about as long. So I'd guess that quite a few Java people who were interested in alternatives got exposed to Groovy before Scala and Clojure started gaining traction. And since there are only so many hours in the day... at some point you have to start building stuff instead of just learning new languages.

Also, Groovy's syntax is very Java like. In fact, Groovy is pretty close to a superset of Java, so you can often - if not always - rename a .java file to .groovy, and compile it with groovyc and run it. This makes it easy to leverage your existing knowledge of Java, while slowly working in the idiomatic Groovy.

All of that said, I personally plan to learn both Scala and Clojure as well; and will probably take my Scala book to the Triangle JVM Hack Night meeting tomorrow night and spend a couple of hours poking at Scala.

Of those languages you mention, Groovy has the most java-like syntax. So maybe since its easy to pick up and does what they need, there is no need to learn/use those other languages.

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