Last year I was taught “Object Orientated Design and Programming” as part of my Birkbeck MSc, using Groovy, a dynamic functional language built on top of Java and running on the Java VM.
I enjoyed it and liked Groovy – I went on to write some pieces of software for my MSc project using it.
But it also gave the impression of being a dying language and there were some complaints from fellow students who thought C# or Java itself would have been a better bet for them jobs wise (to which one of the lecturers responded with admirable chutzpah with a suggestion of using Lisp in the future).
This last week I have again been dabbling in Groovy and I get a sense that the language is suddenly back in fashion and its community of users seems more energy charged than a year ago.
Nothing scientific to back that feeling up with, just my judgement.
Related articles
- A Quick Introduction to the Groovy Language (Part 1) (java.sys-con.com)
- The Big Three – Scala, Clojure and Groovy (thecodegeneral.wordpress.com)
- Advice on what to learn next (daniweb.com)
- DSLs with Groovy for Beginners (java.sys-con.com)
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 