I'm sitting in the general session hall, waiting for the first technical general session to begin. Yesterday was CommunityOne, where we had some interesting discussion about dynamic languages within the context of the RedMonk Unconference. Aside from that, the best parts of the day way announcing that Mingle runs on JRuby, and meeting up with all my soon-to-be fellow ThoughtWorkers. They're a great bunch of people, and we had good fun.
Today was the opening general session, where Rich Green announced some very interesting developments. Among these are the fact that the open sourcing of Java is now complete, that Sun is coopering quite heavily with UN to provide resources for education to areas of the world where this have long been a huge problem. But the most important announcements were about something called JavaFX. I can't really say I understand it completely yet, but it seems to be an effort to tackle Microsoft Silverlight, and also fix several deficiencies in Swing by providing JavaFX Script (which looks very much like F3. I'm not sure if it actually is F3 or something else.). This obviously begs the question why Sun finds it prudent to invent a new language, instead of using one of the many great efforts existing in the dynamic language communities for this problem. For example, both Groovy, Jython and JRuby have different versions of SwingBuilders, which allow you to rapidly create Swing interfaces with a specialized DSL for this.
Except for that, the general session and keynote was more or less like usual. Very flash, very markety, but still more technical than I imagine other conferences are. And it was fun to see Rich Green being compared to Steve Jobs...
The first technical session I went to was called "Cool Things You Can Do with the Groovy Dynamic Language", and was presented by Guillaume Laforge and Dierk König. It was a quite good session, but I can't get away from my general opinions about the Groovy language. So, before I say something about the presentation, I need to describe my feelings for Groovy. Remember, these are my personal opinions, and some are definitely based on feeling without any specific rationalization.
I would really like to like Groovy, but I can't. I've really tried, but I can't find the Groovy language to my liking. And believe me, for some circumstances, Groovy should be able to fill the gap between Ruby and Java better than JRuby, at least in some cases. The Java integration in JRuby is quite hard, dispatch and overloading makes calling Java code complicated (from an implementation point, not for the user). All of this would be much simpler with the Groovy approach. But no, I still can't get along with Groovy. The main reason, I believe, is the feeling I get from all code that the language Groovy have grown piecemal, adding stuff that's neat wherever. I'm not sure this is the actual way Groovy was designed, but it feels like a modern version of Perl. The syntax doesn't mesh, and there are numerous (small, but nonetheless there) inconsistencies in how things are handled; many of the things that the language provide for you is things that really shouldn't be part of the language, but part of a library instead.
So, from this point of view, the presentation walked through several new features of Groovy, and lots of things you can do with it. They talked a bit about the new support for annotations and the plans for generics. Some of it was quite cool; I like the builders (but I prefer Markaby to the XMLBuilder), and some of the features are quite handy. But looking back at my earlier feelings I still see a design process more focused on finding problems with Java, and duct taping them with Groovy. (Like this: in Groovy, all exceptions get handled automatically, making it look as if all exceptions are unchecked.) I have no problem with many of these features, but I don't think it's a good way to create a general purpose language.
I'll be back later with more info on the rest of the days sessions.
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I believe XMLBuilder exists a good deal longer then Markaby :)
Erik: Point, that's true. If I remember correctly they are both based on the Python XML builder. But don't hold me to that either. I have changed the text though, thanks.
I do believe it's F3 that's now promoted to JavaFX. Chris Oliver hasn't blogged about it yet, but the fact that others have indicated it to be and that the similarities between JavaFX and F3 suggest that it indeed is F3. F3 certainly has the capability to be JavaFX anyway.
Personally, I will stick to the story that it's F3.
Python XMLBuilder was inspired by the Ruby builder implementation which was in turn inspired by the Groovy implementation. See http://tinyurl.com/2j3b3m for the announcement email.
I believe James Strachen can be credited with inventing this technique.
It's also incorrect to say "in Groovy, all exceptions get handled automatically". This is not what happens at all. The JVM does not know anyting about checked exceptions so Groovy just generates normal bytecode with no special case code at all. This is, I presume, just what JRuby will do when the bytecode compiler is completed.
"The main reason, I believe, is the feeling I get from all code that the language Groovy have grown piecemal, adding stuff that's neat wherever. I'm not sure this is the actual way Groovy was designed, but it feels like a modern version of Perl. The syntax doesn't mesh, and there are numerous (small, but nonetheless there) inconsistencies in how things are handled; many of the things that the language provide for you is things that really shouldn't be part of the language, but part of a library instead."
This describes Ruby, Groovy, and Perl... why are you attacking Groovy specifically?
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