From: Eleanor McHugh <eleanor@...>
Date: 2009-04-14T19:36:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. Groovy: your perspective

On 14 Apr 2009, at 08:34, James Britt wrote:
> Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
>> Eleanor McHugh wrote:
>>> I followed Groovy development for a while (between 2004-2006) and  
>>> liked what I saw, but ultimately gave up on developing for the JVM  
>>> and lost interest. Were it to break out of that particular ghetto  
>>> I think it could gain in popularity, although from what I recall  
>>> it's similar enough to Ruby in many respects that it might be  
>>> difficult to differentiate itself.
>> I don't know if I'd consider the JVM a ghetto :)
>
>
> In some ways MRI is more of a "ghetto" in that if you ever end up  
> using a native-code library you may find it hard to run you code on  
> multiple platforms, whereas if you use JRuby with Java libs you have  
> far more portability.

All platforms are ghettos by their very nature. In the case of Groovy,  
it's a language closely coupled to a particular platform - the JDK -  
which is out of the control of its creators and therefore breaking  
free from that ghetto could prove too difficult to be worth the  
investment. That's a pity for Groovy because it's a language that's  
fun to play with and that freed of the JDK constraint might not look  
out of place rubbing shoulders with Ruby and Python.

> As it stands, it's a fair bet that Ruby + Java gives you more  
> libraries than Ruby + C.
>
> That's not to claim there are no downsides to running on the JVM,  
> just that the Java platform seems to have been tagged with a very  
> outdated image, and people are doing themselves and others a real  
> disservice to so blithely dismiss it.


I've been coding for almost thirty years, and for ten of those I  
followed the JVM closely enough to have been a reasonable JASM coder.  
So if I'm blithe in my tone, that's not without having formed an  
opinion through experience and come to the conclusion that I want *and  
need* my code to live in a world larger than that circumscribed by the  
JDK.

In Ruby that's easy as Charlie and his confederates have built me a  
first-class tool to use in JRuby with very few restrictions on the  
kind of Ruby code it'll support, whilst MRI still gives me support on  
a host of other platforms thanks to its ANSI-C implementation. For the  
Groovy folks that could well be impossible.


Ellie

Eleanor McHugh
Games With Brains
http://slides.games-with-brains.net
----
raise ArgumentError unless @reality.responds_to? :reason