What was it like to learn Groovy?

[exercism]

What was it like to learn Groovy?

[artamonovkirill]

Prior to learning Groovy, I mainly coded in Java. I learned a bit of Ruby and Python, too.

The reason I looked at Groovy was the discussion about using List.of(1, 2, 3) of Guava library vs. native Java new ArrayList<Integer>(1, 2, 3). To me, those things were unnecessary implementation details, especially in tests. So I went on looking for a language that would have even simpler constructs. And Groovy, with it's [1, 2, 3] literals seemed like a perfect match.

It was very easy to switch to Groovy since bach then it was ~95% Java-compatible. Since Groovy 3, it's even 100% compatible, I believe. This was also a big plus in convincing my teammates to give it a try. The Spock framework was another driver for using Groovy to test Java code - the readability of our tests just sky-rocketed.

Probably since I already knew Java, I didn't have any problems while learning Groovy (compared to learning other languages like Python, Ruby, Go, or Haskel). With Groovy, I could always fall back to solving problems in "Java-way" and make it "Groovier" once I've learned about certain Groovy features.

While learning the language, I was immediately amazed how I can express the same things as in Java with way less boilerplate or unnecessary details. I was able to focus more on the "what" my code is doing, not the "how".

I had a few iterations of "aha" moments with Groovy when I was able to express myself in the same piece of code even better than before in code by applying other new features I've learned so far.

The only few weird things that come to mind are some unconventional method names (collect vs map, inject vs fold or reduce, ...).

I still find Groovy one of the most expressive languages I have learned so far. And also, currently, Groovy would be my "go-to" scripting language for non-trivial tasks (I'd use bash for the trivial ones).

[ErikSchierboom]

We're closing this issue as it was part of our research for the v3 version of Exercism which has just been released.

Thanks everyone for chipping in! It has been greatly appreciated.