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 :)
Previous Topic
