Re:Kotlin becomes second most popular language on the JVM
by zmmmmm on Friday February 07, 2020 @05:20PM
(#22271732)
> Those of us that are part of the Java world since the early days, have been through this multiple times.
The hype curve is definitely in the past, but Groovy is living on
quite well as a small but viable option in the plateau of productivity. In
some ways that is more important because while in the hype phase it is really
hard to judge the true value of a technology. The true value emerges when
the hype is over.
The problem is, there isn't really a better scripting option for the JVM. While
in theory lots of JVM languages (JRuby, Jython ... etc) could fill that gap,
they all have ugly impedance mismatches which Groovy doesn't, so companies
continue to deploy it as a scripting and DSL implementation still. I tried to substitute Kotlin for a bit and went back to Groovy because Kotlin still lacks standard scripting constructs such map and list literals etc.
The hype curve is definitely in the past, but Groovy is living on quite well as a small but viable option in the plateau of productivity. In some ways that is more important because while in the hype phase it is really hard to judge the true value of a technology. The true value emerges when the hype is over.
The problem is, there isn't really a better scripting option for the JVM. While in theory lots of JVM languages (JRuby, Jython ... etc) could fill that gap, they all have ugly impedance mismatches which Groovy doesn't, so companies continue to deploy it as a scripting and DSL implementation still. I tried to substitute Kotlin for a bit and went back to Groovy because Kotlin still lacks standard scripting constructs such map and list literals etc.