> 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.
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.