We Learn, We Marvel, We Forget, ...
Went to a internal lunch meeting yesterday with Zhicheng Li and Shu Zhu at OCI, where Mark Volkmann talked about groovy. (Mark will present on the same topic at the No Fluff, Just Stuff symposium in St. Louis March 19-21, 2004.)
Here's the conversation on the ride back:
When do you think groovy will achieve mainstream acceptance?
It probably won't. And it doesn't need to be.
But BeanShell is being used in important products, that's close to mainstream acceptance.
I'm sure the others, Rhino and Jython, are also being used in other important products. We just don't know yet.
Will we see a big project written entirely in groovy?
Probably not. But I sure can use some of those list iteration facilities. Closures too. :)
You'll know it if you really need something like groovy in your product. If you have to wait for "mainstream acceptance", you probably don't need it.
Maybe Sun should standardize on a scripting language API, so that we can plug in any scripting languages.
I don't like that kind of an API. It actually will lock the developers down and lock vendors out.
Let's go back to Java.
We went back to plain Java coding, using getters and setters and anonymous inner classes and if/then/else statements. The C-style for loop, now, what, 35 years old, worked just fine.