I just saw this little gem, "Groovy: Alive, But Barely Kicking" this morning. I must admit, it gave me pause. After all, who wants to see one of the "driving forces" of a language you're investing time time into to declare that the langauge "never jelled" and also imply that it was a success solely because it got other scripting languages to move onto the JVM?
The piece does get a quote from Guillaume Laforge (the current leader of the Groovy project) that emphasizes the key benefit of Groovy - it eases the migration of Java programmers, and works well with the existing work in Java. The question is, is that going to be enough?
The answer will depend, I think, on how hard it is to leverage existing Java code in these other scripting languages. I've not yet really looked into this, but I did see this little piece on using Velocity from JRuby. From the sample code shown, it doesn't look too hard to play with Java code, and the idea of creating a ruby wrapper object to call the java functionality seems like a pretty good approach to keeping what oddness there is in mixing the java and ruby approaches contained to small parts of the codebase.
Hmmm. I was going to wait until JRuby was 1.0 before playing with it, but now I'm not so sure of that plan...
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If you like adventure, JRuby is for you! We're not quite close to a 1.0 release yet, sure, but most stuff works great and we're getting better every day. If you think Ruby looks like a language you might want to use on the JVM, you should check JRuby out. And if you want to help us hunt down and eliminate bugs, all the better:)
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