Java.next() - The Groovy Programming Language
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A brief analysis of the Groovy Programming Language
batsov.com
table{ myMap.each{k,v-> tr{ td k; td v;}}}
that turned myMap into a HTML table.
This is basically what the guy behind groovy++ has done, but, from what I've heard, they basically told him several years ago that they had no interest in taking the language in a static direction.
This sucks because, in IMO, 90%+ of the calls in a Groovy program can be statically dispatched just like regular Java. Sure, duck typing is useful in a few places, but those few places shouldn't mean my entire program has to be dynamic.
Groovy has an awesome syntax, awesome compile-time AST transformations, etc.--but a dynamic language, in enterprise environments at least, will not be Java.next. Scala is maturing, and Groovy's window of opportunity is quickly closing (or already gone).
1. Closures - items.find { it.name == 'groovy' } is much easier than looping.
2. Language support for collections - Maps can be declared like: [key:'value'], and lists can be declared like: [1,2,3].
3. Easier handling of nulls - The "Elvis Operator" can be used to specify defaults like: (item ?: "defaultvalue") and the safe navigation operator will return null rather than throwing a NullPointerException when doing something like this: (item?.address?.street).
I wish Java had been designed with the same multi-language philosophy that .NET has had from the get go. Binaries produced in any language in .NET don't give any clues to what the language the binary was implemented in. For example, if your writing something using VB.NET and working with a library that was implemented in C# there really isn't any evidence that this is the case and the signatures look the same.
I remember reading about the first versions of Eiffel on .Net. That gave the impression that unless you put a lot of effort into your language, it will probably be just a variant of C#/VB. The first versions of Eiffel for .Net lacked multi-inheritance and I think DBC was crippled somehow too. :-/
Your main point is a little questionable - sure, there are languages very similar to C# (Nemerle, J#, etc.), but then you've got F#, P# (Prolog), IronScheme, IronPython, IronRuby... I mean, the existence of the DLR itself kinda puts holes in your argument (for some of the above languages).
Claiming "yeah, but the F# team did everything" is somewhat true (as they did for the first release), but it's not a meaningful complaint. That's going to be the case for virtually any new paradigmatic language being put onto a general-purpose (i.e., procedural, object-oriented) programming framework. The Clojure team had to do everything to make it work on the JVM, too. And in current releases of .NET, more and more of that is being pulled into .NET core and being leveraged by C#.
It's not inherent to the run-time and libraries. IMHO.
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/6lKfw.png
Chrome reads it as UTF-8 without prompting, I'm curious why that isn't the same in Firefox.
Groovy's syntax is so close to Ruby's you can barely tell them apart sometimes, and its tooling as pretty good, certainly way better than what I believe is available for Go.
Can someone explain what "dynamic memory dispatching" is? Is it perhaps better known under a different name? (Google is no help.)
Edit: Yes, we increased the permgen size and whatnot, but the outages it caused just left people with an unfavorable view of groovy. Which, as I said, is unfortunate, because I think it's pretty cool.
The one thing that disturbs me about groovy is that overloaded methods seems to only be signature checked at runtime, which results in an exception when invoked with the wrong parameters - not a compiler error.
On the 'broader sense' angle, Groovy is a good for certain people/teams who are looking to get more out of Java development without giving up too much of what they have invested in. Pretty much all Java code will run in Groovy unchanged, and you can update existing working Java code with some Groovy decorations in the same file without issue. Moving to JRuby or Jython, for example, require you to make larger changes to rethink entire classes in the new syntax.
Admittedly some people consider this a small point, but it's certainly nice for some people to be able to reuse existing Java syntax without needing to learn a lot of new syntax up front - with Groovy you can try out new syntax as you go, but always drop back to raw Java when you want (again, in the same file - you can use existing Java classes in JRuby and Jython IIRC).
He also mentions Clojure (probably the next in the series after Scala), in addition to Jython and JRuby.
I, personally, have nothing against the name "JVM". Describes which VM we're talking about (even if more than just Java use it)
* Groovy is easy to develop in - it's dynamically typed and far less verbose than Java
* It's mature and stable
* It's easy for Java programmers to learn
* It's easy for Python and Ruby developers to learn
* Grails, groovy.sql.Sql, XmlSlurper and a host of other Groovy libraries
* Documentation is good and support forums are very active
* Groovy is actively developed. Version 1.8 was just released. I haven't had the time to look at the new features but glancing at the changelog they look pretty good.
* And last but not least, Java shops with a heavy investment in Java and Java servers can easily integrate Groovy as opposed to rewrite things in Python and Ruby (For green field development I still prefer Ruby)
https://bitbucket.org/puffnfresh/hello-jvm/src/f78a6a2312ae/...
Interoperability is actually very nice for most languages.
edit: Maybe I've misinterpreted the headline to mean more than it should.
i.e., they're all labelled "java.next()"
And of course Python and Ruby do it differently, having J- and Iron- implementations, each at different versions to the primary implement and each other.