Should I be so enthusiastic about Groovy?

Question

I'm currently working on my project which consists of front and back-end written in PHP and desktop app written in Java, and that's what the plan was before I discovered Groovy and later on Grails.

Now after rewriting my desktop client and sketching some back-end functionality in Groovy I'm considering to drop PHP altogether in favor of Groovy (although I haven't played around with Grails yet.)

For me it just looks like coding in Groovy is as simple as in PHP, but with lots of extra sugar and awesomeness of Java libraries. Comparing those two may sound awkward, but hey I'm an amateur ;)

Finally to my question, from the looks of it most of the articles/blog posts about Groovy I can find is awfully outdated. Am I missing some reason why it's not so popular and which will crush my enthusiasm to bits? :D

Answer 1

Am I missing some reason why it's not so popular and which will crush my enthusiasm to bits?

My answer is an emphatic "No". Groovy really is a very productive language to work with. I spent about a year using it for my day job, and really enjoyed working with it. IMO, Groovy's obscurity has got nothing to do with the language itself, but other factors such as:

• Lack of corporate backing (i.e. marketing $$$)
• Relatively new, version 1.0 was released in 2007
• The programming language market is becoming increasingly crowded as various "new" languages (Scala, F#, Clojure, Groovy) compete for mindshare. This makes it relatively difficult for any one of these languages to capture a significant share of this market.