Sometimes I have the feeling that Scala is the "Second System" of Java. But it wasn't designed by the same people who did Java.
It ships them in a usable state, documented in an accessible way without patronizing language and useless neologisms.
Or would you argue that Honey Boo Boo was the best show on television?
Groovy devs have been unable to keep up with cleanups, improvements and requirements since years. There is just no point in using the language. Everything it could do is done better elsewhere.
The creator of Groovy, James Strachan, said 6 yrs afterwards that if he'd known about Scala at the time, he'd never have created Groovy, so he's arguing the exact opposite viewpoint.
> Popularity != quality
The recent blog by Jochen Theodorou, the tech talent that practically built and maintained Groovy for 10 yrs, at http://blackdragsview.blogspot.com/2015/04/about-being-paid-... says about Groovy's quality...
> G2One management adding feature after feature without testing or documentation
...and identifies that G2One (SpringSource, Pivotal) management as...
> all of the paid Groovy guys... Cedric (developer), Guillaume (manager and evangelist) and me (developer) had to leave Pivotal
Groovy has two use cases:
* scripting Java (tests, Gradle scripts)
* providing a M.O.P. for Grails
If you want to actually build a system on the JVM or Android, use Java or Scala or some language created specifically for that purpose. Groovy was built as a dynamically typed language, with static typing features shunted on much later, and hardly anyone uses them. Groovy's for quick and dirty scripts, like those 30-line Gradle build scripts (unless you need readable stack traces then you're out of luck).