Anyone willing to put a word in for Groovy?

Groovy seems to come up in conversation a reasonable amount. People appear to be doing some interesting things with it. But every time someone tries to advocate the language it leaves me completely cold. Basically all the advocacy seems to come down to:

  • It has “closures”
  • It looks like Java…
  • …but it’s dynamically typed.

Yay?

It has a few features that seem a bit more interesting. It has named (and default?) parameters, which is nice (not exciting, just nice). What little I’ve seen of its metaclass stuff gives me a simultaneous “yikes” and “ooh, that’s kinda neat” reaction.

This isn’t really intended to be a bash at the language. I just don’t know much about it, and none of the information I’ve seen seems terribly compelling. I’d like to hear some stuff about why it’s actually a nice language to use. I probably still won’t use it – I have enough languages on my plate as it is – but I’d like to be a little less ignorant about it.

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2 thoughts on “Anyone willing to put a word in for Groovy?

  1. helium

    The fact that ‘It has “closures”‘ alone would make me want to use this language rather than java, even if ‘It looks like Java’ and is ‘dynamically typed’.

  2. David R. MacIver

    Yes, of course. But it’s not like there’s a shortage of JVM languages with support for functional programming.

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