I must say I like a lot of what Groovy has to offer. Main consideration at the moment is adoption. Wonder if it will ever really take off, or whether it left it too late and will always be "another scripting language" on the JVM compared to JRuby (and of course the grand daddy of scripting languages on the JVM :->).

Thoughts?

Thoughts?!

Looks like I'll need to add it to my list of languages to learn . . . Anyone played with Erlang at all?

I see ColdFusion as "the 80% solution" - a great glue language that allows you to do lots of things pretty well and pretty quickly, and I think they have continued in that tradition with a lot of the functionality added in CF 8.

Traditionally, ColdFusion was *the* RAD scripting language on the JVM, but with Groovy, JRuby, Jython and the rest it now has to compete with a bunch of other languages. So, what is left? .NET integration, a kick ass templating language, and a very powerful set of tag libs that allow you to solve 80% of a lot of problems very quickly. It doesn't sound like that much when it is put that way, but for the right use cases it is still more than worth the licensing costs . . .

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To be honest, it doesn't really matter to me. While I might love to be in the enviable position of having too many developers to be able to direct them efficiently, running a bootstrapped startup, that just isn't part of my world right now.

To be fair, after reading the post I completely disagree with pretty much all of his contentions (as do a number of the commenters), so I'll stick with my original assertion, but it is always important to provide airtime for points of view you disagree with - otherwise you just end up with groupthink and miss the next big thing . . .

Anyone else got any thoughts on this?

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It is a shame that Microsoft is doing so much really interesting technical work but is (from a business perspective quite naturally) tying it to a stack that is increasingly unattractive to a lot of developers.

Thoughts?

I always love comparitive reviews of technology. I know, I know, I should just go write an application in every language and framework. Call me lazy, but I like to synthesize other peoples opinions and then just research or play with anything that isn't clear from the balance of the reviews available.

Anyhow, some interesting perspectives and pointers on the various languages they're reviewing.

Loved his characterization of Perl (and Lisp) programmers. Made me chuckle:

The Perl community's starting to look more and more like the Lisp community every day. The combination of incredible power, reclusive wizards, and antisocial Slashdotters gives it the vibe of a lava-filled wasteland dotted with towers where strange men with white beards obsess over unspeakable knowledge.

Firstly it allows optional static typing to me which seems like a great choice. I get the benefits of static typing, I love the benefits of dynamic typing. To me, a language that supports both (along with an IDE designed for such a hybrid) gives a flexibility that I'd have to play with but could be useful.

It also mentions that Groovy is implemented using an implementation of a Meta-Object Protocol.

I'm gonna have to find out more about how that is implemented as I think it could provide some great benefits to Java programmers if it was packaged with the right kind of API for extending the syntax of Java in-language.

Of course it raises all of the usual "are in-language DSLs really maintainable" kind of questions, but I'm definitely going to have to find out more about how this was implemented and if any elements of its implementation could be learnt from.

Thoughts?