

Groovy Weekly #41 - mindcrime
http://glaforge.appspot.com/article/groovy-weekly-41

======
vorg
I commented on this when you submitted it a week ago:

    
    
        https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8454462
    

An associated comment from you on why a weekly newsletter on Groovy containing
mostly links to Twitter tweets would be of interest to Hacker News readers
would be better than resubmitting it, IMO.

~~~
mindcrime
Unless I copied the wrong URL, it wasn't a resubmission - this is issue #41,
that was issue #40.

As to the "why" question... well, because Groovy rocks. And plenty of other
similar weekly collection type articles routinely get posted to HN. Groovy
might not be as trendy as, say, Javascript, Scala, or Clojure or Haskell or
whatever, but it still has a lot of fans.

Of course no one is forced to click this link, or vote for it. All I can do is
submit it, and let what may happen, happen.

~~~
vorg
Sorry, I mistook the issue number.

> plenty of other similar weekly collection type articles routinely get posted
> to HN

I haven't noticed the others - perhaps they get similarly ignored. One problem
with Groovy's marketing over the years has been blitz campaigns, especially
initiating weekly things when monthly would make more sense. I remember the
Groovy Quiz launched around 2007 - it was weekly then fizzled out after a
month, but if it had been monthly it might have had more interest and stuck
around.

In the case of these newsletters, about half the links point to twitter tweets
which makes them worthless. It was launched on Christmas Eve last year
[http://grails.1312388.n4.nabble.com/ANN-First-issue-of-
the-q...](http://grails.1312388.n4.nabble.com/ANN-First-issue-of-the-quot-
Groovy-Weekly-quot-column-td4652791.html) in an apparent attempt to go
unnoticed in nudging Groovy users away from the Codehaus mailing list and onto
the project person's personal website, including soliticing for private
mailouts. Groovy announcements also get made in this newsletter _instead of_
the Codehaus mailing list, _despite_ the assurances in the above link that
that wouldn't happen.

By submitting these links to Hacker News you're assisting one of the Groovy
despots to take over personal control of the Codehaus implementation of
Groovy, which is why I'm suspicious. This despot has a long history of doing
this, and it's only because of my intervention the 3 present developers are
even mentioned on Groovy's wikipedia page, instead of the project person
putting his own name there 3 times
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Groovy_%28programm...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Groovy_%28programming_language%29&diff=570593212&oldid=569798025)

~~~
mindcrime
_By submitting these links to Hacker News you 're assisting one of the Groovy
despots to take over personal control of the Codehaus implementation of
Groovy, which is why I'm suspicious. This despot has a long history of doing
this, and it's only because of my intervention the 3 present developers are
even mentioned on Groovy's wikipedia page, instead of the project person
putting his own name there 3 times_

Mmm... interesting. Honestly, I use Groovy heavily, and am a huge fan of the
language (and Grails) but I don't spend a lot of time interacting with the
rest of the "Groovy Community", so I wasn't aware of any of that. I don't know
if I'm even subscribed to the main Groovy and/or Grails mailing lists or not.
I do lurk in ##Groovy on Freenode a bit, but there doesn't seem to be much
discussion there.

Anyway, I have "no dog in this fight" so to speak, in that I'm not backing any
particular "camp" or anything in any sort of "fight for the soul of Groovy".
I'm just a guy who uses it and think's it's a bit of a shame that the buzz
around Groovy has kinda died down, in favor of Scala, Clojure, etc.

~~~
vorg
I did use Groovy a lot from around 2005 to 2011 but moved on since then to
Clojure for day to day scripting. I'm still trying to create a better
implementation of Groovy but one snag of course is the lack of a spec that
doesn't change all the time.

I haven't used Grails at all. If your primary use of Groovy is with Grails
then your experience of both the language and the community will be quite
different.

~~~
mindcrime
Yep, most, if not all, of my Groovy coding is for Grails based apps. I'm not
really using it for lightweight scripting, nor for dedicated backend-service
work.

And while I'm a fan of Groovy, I am still very interested in learning both
Clojure and Scala, but I'm too busy with the day-to-day stuff to spend a lot
of time on either of those. :-(

