Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Your Thoughts on the Groovy Scripting Language?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the coffee-with-sugar-and-cream dept.

lelitsch asks: "Does anyone have first hand experience with Groovy? I am just coming off implementing a Plone-based intranet CMS and got hooked on scripting languages and Python all over again. Since most of my projects in the near future are going to be in Java or have large Java components, I was wondering if it's time to trade Jython--which seems to be falling further behind the Python release cycle--for something else. Groovy sounds like a fun thing to look at, but it seems a bit new and thin. Also, what are other languages (JRuby and Rhino, for example) you have used to script in Java?"

2 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. People who like general-purpose languages by Ivan+Matveitch · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    other than ocaml and ruby are totally insane. I mean, I can code in java or c just fine, but it makes me want to pull my hair out, and all decent normal people must feel the same way.

  2. Why bother (flamebait +1fp) by jschmerge · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    With the advent of Java, a lot of young programmers finally saw a way of running their OS-specific programs on other platforms. Unfortunately, the limitation was that a Java VM had to be ported to the platform that they wanted to run their code upon. This Java VM was written in C or C++. Sadly, the distraught Java programmer could not contribute to the effort to port the Java VM to their favorite platforom because they did not understand the intricacies of such things as memory management. Thus, their code did not run on their favorite platform.

    These programmers, being passionate about their art, resolved to learn the skillz they needed to port the Java VM to their favorite platform. As they learned the necessary knowledge to run their code, realized that they could have gotten their code to run on any platform much more easily if they wrote it in a compiled-to-machine-code language. These programmers are no longer Java programmers.

    Why write code in a scripting language that runs on fewer platforms than other scripting languages? The main advantage of a scripting language is (arguably) the ability to run your code on multiple platforms. A scripting language should be ubiquitous; tying your code to both a compiler that some guy created and the Java VM is not a good idea(tm).