People might downvote the original comment because it adds nothing to the discussion. They might downvote it after adding the "side note" because now the post moves the discussion off topic (e.g. this post) or because meta-whining is not considered good form on HN.

Consider downvotes as an editorial tool to help you create better posts. When you see a downvote the first response should be, "what is wrong with my post?"

If it takes the thread off topic, delete your post.

If it is on topic, consider rewriting your post so that your ideas are communicated more clearly, your arguments flow logically, your position is reasonably supported by relevant details or examples, and that it does not rely on ad hominem or sweeping generalizations.

Cause apparently groovy's not cool?

The presentation was about how to switch to Scala and the primary consideration was "I want to do functional programming", not "I want to use something like Java, but less verbose" (which would lean more towards groovy or possibly jruby).

OT: You probably got downvoted because your comment adds nothing to the discussion—if everyone wrote "I agree" or "I disagree" (with no justification as to why) on comments they agree or disagree with the signal-noise ratio would be much lower.

Only a small fraction of the code you write is performance critical. Write the app in Groovy, profile it, rewrite the bottlenecks in Java.

> ATS is brilliant, but how many devs could tell you anything about it?

Might that be why the benchmarks game tells devs about ATS?