Re: Groovy creator and Scala

Sukit Tretriluxana schrieb:
> Hi all,
>
> I am one of those who really like Groovy language. However, recently I
> ran into James Strachan's blog talking about how cool Scala is. Talking
> how cool another language is is not strange or wrong to me but he even
> mentioned that if he knew about Scala before, he wouldn't have bothered
> creating Groovy to begin with. It's like even himself no longer believe
> in his language anymore.

James created also more or less Jelly, a XML-based language that was
used in Maven 1. After experiencing so much pain with that even in th
Groovy build he said a few years ago he would never again make a
programming language. If he had that state back when he started Groovy,
then Groovy would not have been born too. Also Groovy developed very
much since Guillaume and myself took over. It is by far not any longer
the language James developed, because to him it was too painful and time
consuming to solve all the edge cases, to do all the discussions and
such. Don't get me wrong. James is great in initiating projects and gets
them to a state were the examples do work. But as soon as you go away
from the examples and alter them just a tiny bit, it fails. And it fails
with bad error messages, in unpredicted ways and with obvious bugs. And
that is not because he is a bad programmer or lazy, it is because he
is/was doing too much at the same time. And of course the Scala of now
is not the Scala back then. Also current Scala would probably not have
looked like it does now, because Scala, even if Scala people would never
agree, was also influenced by Groovy.

As for Groovy itself... you could say James abandoned Groovy way before
it was 1.0. As I said, he is great in starting things, but at some point
he needs people that get serious with it, and that was Guillaume and
myself for a long time. If we two had not taken control back then,
Groovy would have died. That is for example because James was more
interested in ActiveMQ, then in Groovy all of a sudden. Well "all of a
sudden" is not right.. he needed it for his work as he used Groovy
before for his work and continued to use it later on.

So if you ask if he considers dumping the language, then I would say as
an active part he did that over four years ago already. So it does not
matter, does it? You can say that current Groovy is Guillaume and me
mostly, but many people did come and go, some did contribute a lot...
like for example John Wilson, other did only cover a small area.

Developing a language is a lot of stress. You have to discuss things on
an emotional level very often. It is almost like religion. You have
fanatics, you have logic people, but most people are in between and live
according to their believes. And believes is something you cannot always
cover with logic, especially if you argue against it while being
influenced yourself. Also you often have to argue against established
practices that are named "best practice" because it works fro them and
they are not willing to give a new thing a chance to that extend anymore.

And many people get tired of these discussions, so did James and so did
for example John. Back in 2004 James would maybe have chosen Nice as
language, which seems to be quite dead these days. Scala was not on the
"top" back then.

bye blackdrag


--
Jochen "blackdrag" Theodorou
The Groovy Project Tech Lead (http://groovy.codehaus.org)
http://blackdragsview.blogspot.com/


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