Is Groovy like Java?

I usually don't mention the G word in my blog - the results have a tendency to be less than palatable. This time I'm going to make an exception though. The reason is that this meme has been floating around as an argument for Groovy, and I really don't agree with it. In fact, the reason I'm writing about it is because I think the meme in itself generally can be bad for Groovy.

The thing I'm talking about is the saying that Groovy is just like Java. That you can start using Groovy directly without learning anything about Groovy and that basically all Java syntax is valid Groovy.

Now, the last part has never been really true, since there are a few valid Java constructs that are not supported in Groovy (anonymous classes, I'm looking at you). This might be fixed in the 1.5 version. I don't really know, but that's not the point. Since Groovy isn't using the Java parser there will always be a few small corner cases that are not valid in Groovy but Java accepts. This is not a problem, by the way. The only way it can be a problem is when you're using Groovy the wrong way, or you absolutely need to do something that Groovy doesn't support. Since one of the Groovy catch calls is that you shouldn't implement everything in Groovy, this can't really be a concern either. If you're using Groovy correctly, you should just drop down to the Java layer for that particular feature.

Now that that part is out of the way, let's take a look at the other parts of this idea. Namely that you should choose Groovy because it's just like Java, and you can start writing Java code directly in Java. These statements are definitely true, since you can absolutely pick up a language that way. In my mind, though, this misses the whole point of using another language on top of the JVM. If you're building an application and chooses to use Groovy for this instead of Java, isn't the reason that you're doing that the fact that you expect Groovy to give you something Java does not? And if that's the case, doesn't it sound like a disservice to people picking up Groovy to say that they can begin by just programming Java. There is no gain here. Really. In fact, the equivalent program in Groovy and Java will perform much worse on Groovy since there are several layers of dispatching in Groovy that you don't have in Java. The result? An application with exactly the same source code, but running 10 times slower.

Since this message is mostly used in marketing and introduction facilities, the people it's geared at are by definition newbies to the Groovy world. Many of them are totally new to dynamic languages. And the first thing they do is write Java in Groovy, find it slow and obviously, from that point don't understand why you should use Groovy. This is bad for Groovy. Groovy has some extremely powerful features and libraries that can really make your life on the JVM blissful (compared to using Java, for example). Groovy's integration with Java is top notch, which means that you can always fall back to Java when you need Java specific features. If you're using Groovy, I think you should use the full power of the language so you can actually get the full benefit of Groovy.