And just a couple of hours ago I was thinking "How come I haven't seen any articles on Groovy on the front page in a while?".
Seems its hype has been eclipsed by Clojure and Scala.
Seems its hype has been eclipsed by Clojure and Scala.
"I’m talking about at Dr. Nic’s talk at RubyConf 2011, a little more than a year ago. Dr. Nic had a fairly simple message: when performance matters, build multithreaded programs on JRuby (also: stop using EventMachine). Now granted he was working the company that was subsidizing JRuby development at the time, but I didn’t, and I for one strongly agreed with him. Not many other people in the room did. The talk seemed to be met with a lot of incredulity."
So even among Rubyists, there has been growing interest in Ruby beyond the MRI, and if that is happening in the land of Ruby, then the argument for Groovy is that much weaker.
At the same time, the growing interest in dealing with concurrency certainly helped increase interest in Scala and Clojure, and furthermore, functional programming in general. If you are a developer who wants to harness the power of concurrency for greater speed, Scala and (especially) Clojure are full of interesting ideas for how to do that. Groovy, meanwhile, feels off-topic.
Ruby doesn't have optional strong typing, which is critical to Groovy's bridging of Java and Ruby.
The optional strong typing enables a host of significant advantages, from code readability and assertions to IDE tooling/autocomplete ease... better API design... and many other things.