This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by James Robertson. Original Post: What are the benefits? Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by James Robertson Latest Posts From Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants

This post piqued my interest - a Java developer asks a question about Groovy:

Well... the Codehaus site tells me a lot about what I guess I need to know about the language... but I'm still wondering why I'd want to use it. The home page says:

Groovy is a new agile dynamic language for the JVM combining lots of great features from languages like Python, Ruby and Smalltalk and making them available to the Java developers using a Java-like syntax.

Okay... great features, I guess, except I don't know what the great features from Python, Ruby, and Smalltalk are that I'm looking forward to. Agile and dynamic here look like buzzwords, although they both have real meaning.

The next paragraph:

Groovy is designed to help you get things done on the Java platform in a quicker, more concise and fun way - bringing the power of Python and Ruby inside the Java platform.

Um. A quicker, more concise, and fun way... when I don't really have a problem doing quick, concise things in Java as it is. (Maybe my definitions are poor.) The power of Python and Ruby still don't do much for me.

This points out something I commented on in a post Joel made awhile back - where Joel claimed that "millions of developers" had seen Lisp and rejected it. What I'm seeing is that lots of developers have never so much as seen anything outside the C family (with the possible exception of Basic). That's why we see posts like the one above - and I'm not pointing at it in order to ridicule it. Simply put, many developers can't imagine what benefits a dynamic language might have because they've never seen one. To them, it's all about what they learned in C and its various cousins.

This tells me that we - the proponents of dynamic languages - have a rather large education issue in front of us. It's not so much that people disagree with us about dynamic languages vs. static ones (although there's plenty of that) - it's that they have no idea whatsoever as to what a dynamic language is.