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Comment by zmmmmm | Hacker News Reader

> So what does Scala have left?

This is why I think long term Groovy is better positioned than Scala, even if short term Scala has more of the mindshare. Groovy actually offers something fundamentally different, while Scala is perpetually trying to compete on Java's home turf. If people really want a pure, statically typed language Kotlin is pretty good and has less impedance mismatch with Java.

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> If people really want a pure, statically typed language Kotlin is pretty good and has less impedance mismatch with Java.

I see this the other way around: Java genuinely has eaten most of the good parts of Kotlin, because Kotlin is positioned as a small enhancement over Java rather than a language that brings major improvements as Scala does. Adopting Kotlin means paying much the same cost as adopting Scala, but for much less in the way of benefits.

This is why Kotlin is such a hit for Android devs, who are stuck with only half the features of Java 8 (at best).

What fundamentally different does Groovy offer?

What do you mean by "Scala is trying to compete on Java's home turf"?

When Apache Groovy was first released, it offered closures and dynamic typing on the JVM ecosystem, but nowadays Java has lambdas and inferred typing, so Groovy doesn't really have much fundamentally different to offer anymore. And since version 2.x, Groovy is also "trying to compete on Java's home turf" because it has static-typing annotations, but Kotlin and Scala are probably better choices if you want static typing on the JVM because it was baked into them from the get-go instead of being bolted on as in Groovy 2.x.

Groovy is a truly dynamic language (with all the pros and cons that come with that). So you can put it into contexts such as interactive scripting where Java will always be suboptimal and solve problems Java doesn't even want to solve. On the other hand, every single good idea that Scala comes up with will eventually be co-opted by Java, because there is no reason for that not to happen. It is just a matter of time.

When higher kinded types come to Java, please ring me up!

Touche - yes, I agree that Java is probably never going to attempt to introduce that!

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