A developer in my Groovy presentation at this weeks No Fluff in Chicago brought up a good point.
He has been using Groovy for the last month or so, and he feels like he can experiment a lot.
What does this mean? I totally understand what he is saying here.
If I am working with a language such as Groovy, or Ruby, or many others, I find myself starting up a shell, or an editor, and hacking out some code. I poke and prod at new APIs. I try new things. I play.
With environments like Java, C/C++, etc I don’t feel like that. It feels more ridged, and I feel like I have to “Start a new Project” in an IDE. I have to setup classpaths. Copy over all of these libraries. It FEELS like a pain. It is annoying to have to write some code and go through the compile/build/run cycle, even though the tools help me out now.
Deep down I also feel like I should be comtemplating my code a lot more. Designing it. Etc. I feel bad about playing :)
A lot of this is pschological of course. I do setup a “scratchpad” directory under src/ to allow me to play on a project more easily.
Sometimes I want to be a kid again. And when I do that I play with Groovy :)
October 4th, 2004 at 6:12 pm
A setup script is nice. I have things setup so each project has one… and that is great… but it isn’t ideal.
I still can’t open up javash and start probing the API. However with groovysh I can probe that java API (as with BeanShell/Jython/JRuby/insert more).
Jan: I understand what you are saying re large projects. However, one of the largest projects I have been involved with was (way back) in Perl. With good practices it was very managable indeed.
D
October 5th, 2004 at 6:18 pm
Hey Dion,
I was at your first session on Groovy and it was very interesting. One of my buddies at work was there too and we were just talking about Groovy this morning. He said he didn’t see it “catching on” all that much but I told him that for a guy like me who actually prefers a language/environment like PHP (in many situations) over Java or .Net (shocking, I know!), Groovy is rather interesting. Of course, I’d actually rather see the Parrot project take off for dynamic languages like PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, etc. I think a common cross platform engine that best suits dynamic languages is better than wedging them into the JVM or .Net’s CLR. Although, I do like the concept of utilizing Java’s strong suite of libraries so that’s +1 for Groovy. :)
I’m skeptical about Java these days. (Ditto for Web Services…sorry Justin!) It seems like the big vendors call the shots with the JCP process and many Java developers are consumed with theoretically correct solutions versus real world ones. That may be changing a bit with projects like Spring catching on and EJB being given the boot by many developers, but I’m still a bit skeptical.
I tend to agree with Dave Thomas when he expressed his concern that technologies were coming and going too fast. We just learn something, get half way good at it and then throw it away only to start from scratch with another new technology. The Java world seems to really get beat up over this — look no further than persistence and MVC frameworks. Competition is good, but change simply for the sake of change (or politically charged motives) is not so good.
Anyway, the conference was great! I attended both your Groovy and JDO sessions and they were excellent. You’re a very good speaker which is rather rare in the technology space. I’m recommending more of our development team go to the conference in Milwaukee next year.
Josh
P.S. Yes, I was the guy expressing similar view points during the server side BOF and the one who asked the (obvious poke to get the panel going) question about Open Source Java. I couldn’t resist. :)
P.P.S. What is up with a tech conference not having wireless Internet access available?!