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Comment by mindcrime | Hacker News Reader

Man, Grails / Groovy never get any love from these poll authors! C'mon, Grails rocks people... :-)

Seriously, I switched all of our development from Java/Tapestry/etc. to Groovy/Grails a few years ago, and really couldn't be happier with the decision. Grails isn't flawless, but it mostly "just works" and makes my life SO much easier than before.

No, it isn't the "flavor of the day" like node.js or what-have-you, but it works, it stays out of the way, and gets the job done. And it lets me leverage the decade plus of experience doing Java that I previously experienced. What more could you ask for?

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I chose Scala/Play framework for the same reasons. Java might be awful, but the JVM is a beast.

>Though my tip though for the long term replacement of javac is Scala. I'm very impressed with it! I can honestly say if someone had shown me the Programming in Scala book by by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill Venners back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy. -James Strachan

As someone who is trying to swing back to the new world of JVM development (my last effort was Spring and J2EE 6 years ago) just curious who is going to win out?

Play or Lift?

Dropwizard

I'd also put my 2¢ out for JRuby. It's amazing how nice it can be to have Java libraries mixed in with Ruby on Rails, and your only penalty for it is a delayed startup cost (with potentially faster JIT to boot, and new Java 8 scripting performance to look forward to).

I ditched Grails for Play in 2011, definitely prefer Scala over Groovy any day of the week.

I have really only experimented with Scala, so I'm not in a position to really judge it. But my initial impression is that Scala makes it awfully easy to write "write only code" that no one else can read. The amount of optional syntax, and the multitude of different ways to do the same thing, doesn't sit quite so well with me.

OTOH, I have generally been a fan of languages with static type systems, and I believe Scala tends to be a bit more performant than Groovy. I'll probably revisit Scala at some point, but right now Groovy is working really well for me.

Don't get me wrong, Groovy was (and likely still is) a very pleasant alternative to boilerplate laden Java, but the lack of static typing and runtime MOP magic was, in hindsight, more hindrance than help.

Agreed re: many ways to do one thing, Scala's no Python ;-) Readability is a matter of experience. From the outside looking in some Scala code may look fairly dense, but the same can be said of Haskell. Groovy wins in this department, no argument there, any Java dev can grok Groovy.

> right now Groovy is working really well for me

Happy you've found a language that works out for you! You're certainly a prolific promoter of Groovy here at Hacker News...

7 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7360491 "Most of our code is in Groovy"

20 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7278426 "Assuming there is a next startup and it's anything like the current startup, then I'd probably go with Groovy again. Groovy has worked very well for us."

2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7042329 "We've been using Grails and Groovy extensively (almost exclusively) at Fogbeam Labs for about 3 years now, and I am very happy with how that decision has worked out"

2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7013785 "Anyway, if you already know Java and have some familiarity with that world, I can't recommend Groovy and Grails highly enough."

2 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011934 "if you asked me to write a non-trivial program starting today, and I had to optimize for productivity, I'd pick Groovy."

Heh, that's interesting in a sense... especially given that I'm not involved with either Groovy or Grails projects in and of themselves (eg, not a committer / contributor to either), just a happy fan.

I do find it curious though, that you took the time necessary to look all of that up and post it. I'm sure every language has a handful of people who are particularly vocal about their support for it. :-)

> you took the time necessary to look all of that up and post it

Less than 5 minutes work. Having remembered many similar comments from you in the past, I used the search field at the bottom of the page, searching for "groovy", clicked the "comments" and "sort by date", then used the browser search function to jump to references to "mindcrime", cutting and pasting, then editing.

+10000 - we've switched to Grails ~3 years ago, probably our best tech decision EVER.

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