Props to what Guillaume has accomplished, but the original raison d'etre for Groovy existing has largely been supplanted by the rise of JRuby and Scala. When Groovy was initially developed JRuby was (arguably) not yet mature enough for production, so developers wanting to use Rails under the JVM were basically out of luck. Grails was developed in response to this need.
Now that JRuby is more mature (and, as of today, the only one of the two with official sponsorship) the need for Grails is greatly diminished. The only other major development effort that utilizes Groovy is Gradle, and that has been met with mixed levels of enthusiasm. Add to this that Java itself has made some strides with adding functional(-ish) features to the language, and the benefits that Groovy brings to the table are not as pronounced as they once were.
And for devs who are wanting something that is more purely functional there is Scala.
Given this I'm not particularly surprised to see Pivotal's decision here. Groovy has always struggled for more widespread relevance, and while it is sad to see this happen, it's also far from unreasonable.
> Given this I'm not particularly surprised to see Pivotal's decision here
Pivotal's decision is likely based not only on what you see, but on what else they see but you can't. They can see trends and revenues before the rest of us can, like former SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson who jumped ship over to Scala.
These are some concerns with Groovy I've blogged and commented about a lot over the past few years:
* the failure of static typing to take hold in any way. Groovy's a dynamically-typed scripting language for Grails, Gradle build scripts, and Java class manipulation. Virtually no-one uses Groovy to build systems, and even Gradle's codebase is virtually all Java. Groovy's a good scripting language for Java, like bash for Linux, and the project management should have stuck to their knitting and made it better instead of diversifying into static typing and now Android.
* their obsession with popularity rankings. Tiobe, Stack Overflow, and Github are gamed. The download numbers are fabricated. This goes far beyond what other programming language communities get up to. A year ago Groovy was number #18 in Tiobe (Oct 2003) but now they're not even in the top 50, and in April 2011, Groovy dropped from #25 to #65 in a single month, all this because of someone manipulating search engine results for some short-term marketing.
* the constant fight for control over the product. The original post is to a person's personal blog instead of one on Codehaus or Pivotal. This started happening a year ago, when that person also started soliciting for subscribers to a personal weekly mailout instead of supporting the community mailing list. No-one knows who controls the new Groovy website being promoted. One of the 5 despots in the official Codehaus despotry is trying to take over. This has been going on for the entire lifetime of Groovy when its creator was pushed out.
* the lack of documentation or any language standard designed to make people dependent on consulting and conferences. In the Groovy 1.x days, they even appeared to be changing things to shake off other independent documentation efforts or addon software like Groovy++. When the present management took over, they kept the JSR standard inactive to deliberately prevent anyone building another implementation.
I'm only talking about what happened to Groovy after its creator James Strachan left the project, not before. As for Grails, I don't know much about it except that Groovy's direction seems to be dictated by it. And Gradle seems to be on course for dropping Groovy as their sole scripting language if you read between the lines on their website.
+1 - most of grails is also written in java, drives me crazy when trying to debug some of the day to day weirdness you get with grails..
It's good to get a view of whats going on within the community here, I've only ever seen it from the outside looking in.
That said I love groovy as a language. A friend and I wrote a fairly complicated currency breakdown algorithm (lots of corner cases and BigDecimals) once in groovy in about 3 hours, was about 40 lines of code. The production codebase was java so after porting it was something like 300+ lines of unintelligble masses of .divide() .multiply() .compareTo() and so on.
No, that is annotations that assists the compiler. In Groovy 1.X I could still write public List<MyObject> mylist = new ArrayList<MyObject>() and it would behave exactly as you would expect.
By static typing, I meant compile-time type checking, and statically-typed compilation. You describe run-time type checking in dynamically-typed compiled code which was in Groovy (without generics) from the beginning but makes the code run even slower than the already slow dynamically-typed compiled code without such run-time type checking. Run-time type checking with generics was added to Groovy from version 1.5.
Perhaps I should've used the expressions "compile-time ..." and "run-time ..." to be more accurate, but virtually everyone uses "statically-typed" and "dynamically-typed" in their place.
Actually the Groovy developers call it optional typing, not static typing. And it has always been confusing.
Still though, if you really really need static typing at compile time, Groovy never stopped you. You have always had the possibility to call Java code from Groovy and Groovy code from Java as Groovy compiles to valid Java byte code.
Ruby doesn't offer one of Groovy's killer features: optional static typing.
And Scala... far too alien and complex. There was some talk out there by one of the original Scala dudes talking about how there are something like 30 different fundamental types in Scala.
Groovy offers the most accessible functional programming paradigms to Java programmers. It is a sweet spot.
I loathe the "it's to hard" argument. I understand it, and it always makes sense. But it's like a drug. So many organizations fall prey to refusing to adapt until it's too late.
That said, it sounds like Groovy is a great fit for your organization.
Since my dabble with Groovy for a JSF framework back in 2009, I never really used it, except now that Google is forcing it on me.
From a few talks I have watched on the internet, it actually seems that Groovy is trying to adopt every language feature, like being lost while looking for new a direction kind of.
Kind of trying to stay relevant in a world of Scala, Clojure, Ceylon, Kotlin, js_ocaml, who knows what.
Maybe I am completly wrong, this was my impression after seeing recent videos.
Well, I actually like Groovy, and was trying to keep my personal opinion out of my original post. The fact remains, though, that whatever strengths Groovy has as a language it has struggled to gain significant traction.
>The fact remains, though, that whatever strengths Groovy has as a language it has struggled to gain significant traction
Compared to what? JRuby? Groovy's adoption, from the number's I've seen, walks all over JRuby's.
It's just that the Java world is not fashionable (besides say Clojure) and you don't often hear from the people who use Groovy in their enterprise projects, whereas 10 startups using the language-du-jour can create the impression that it's the hot shit on HN.
That was not at -all- my experience when I went to one in Atlanta. I and one other guy were the only ones in t-shirts; every single other person was in polo and khakis at least, with quite a few dress shirts and suits. Pretty sure it was mostly dominated by enterprise. Admittedly, that was my one and only experience with one; it was sufficiently enterprise-y and uninteresting for me that I never went back.
IME, the strengths were primarily that it was Java+. However, the Java-heavy organizations that might most benefit from it tended to also be the most averse to change. Changing "that much" for "only" incremental change wasn't worth the risk for risk-averse companies. The companies that weren't risk averse tended to try it, but also go outside the JVM altogether when appropriate. So... in a way it was too good at just being a more useful Java, but that wasn't enough for Java-heavy shops.
I agree that there are a lot of languages that do Groovyish things, and that does make it easier to do without Groovy, but still none of them hits that sweet spot quite the way Groovy does. Groovy is still what I'd like the next version of Java to be.
I really like to know why you were downvoted, because I made the same observations you did and basically came to the same conclusion. I'd add the really bad IDE support. I've met some developers that said the only thing that kept them from leaving Groovy was that Grails and Spock are really great and worth the trouble. Other than that I see Groovy's future more as a glue language and as a language for tools. Which I'd find very unfortunate because I like Groovy's simplicity & flexibility as a JVM language.
I tried to install the Groovy plugins on a default Eclipse installation and never got the same result I got on the bloated default GGTS installation. But even with GGTS I had a mediocre experience at best. I tried the commercial version of IntelliJ two years ago and it was okay, but still lacking compared to the Java autocompletition. I'm really happy that the situation is better now.
As I use Groovy more of a host for DSLs (like Gradle or Spock), I hope tooling for this areas will improve. In my eyes, this is Groovy's sweet spot.
Now that JRuby is more mature (and, as of today, the only one of the two with official sponsorship) the need for Grails is greatly diminished. The only other major development effort that utilizes Groovy is Gradle, and that has been met with mixed levels of enthusiasm. Add to this that Java itself has made some strides with adding functional(-ish) features to the language, and the benefits that Groovy brings to the table are not as pronounced as they once were.
And for devs who are wanting something that is more purely functional there is Scala.
Given this I'm not particularly surprised to see Pivotal's decision here. Groovy has always struggled for more widespread relevance, and while it is sad to see this happen, it's also far from unreasonable.