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by Chad Fowler.
Original Post: Java Programmers to Syntax Familiar Is
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Richard Monson-Haefel writes about how Groovy is being proposed as an
"official" language for the JVM. It would definitely be nice to
have a dynamic language "officially" supported on the JVM by Sun.
I might even sneak it into a project or two while nobody’s looking.
But the thing that really caught my attention was this excerpt from the
"Why Groovy?" rationale, defending its choice over Jython or JRuby:
..is the best choice because it was built from the ground up for
the Java Platform and uses syntax that is familiar to Java developers..
Glenn and I were chatting a
couple of mornings ago about AppleScript and how it’s said to be
"easy to use", because it’s so much like English. The
problem, though, is that it looks like English and feels like English (sort
of), but it’s not English. My brain wants it to be English and
I end up typing English phrases into the editor that don’t parse.
Incidentally, as someone who is very familiar with Java, I have the same
problem on occasion with JavaScript (here's
why you should use Groovy instead of JavaScript). It confused me
because it looked like Java, but it wasn’t Java.
The point of adding Groovy as an "officially" supported language
for the JVM would be to allow programmers to think and do things
differently than they can with the Java language. If the language is so
semantically different, why struggle to make it syntactically similar? Why
not let a different thing actually look different?
It’s good to be uncomfortable on occasion. It shows you that
you’re growing.
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