This has always been a problem with Groovy; terrible communication from the core language developers. It's unfortunate because I think Groovy could be a lot more popular than it is but I think most developers are unaware of its existence even on just the stock JVM.

Well, the fact that I can't recall ANY Groovy core developer answering a comment on HN ever, also speaks volumes. Or even some devoted Groovy contributor.

To be fair, which languages do have their core developers posting here, and especially on a regular basis? Maybe I just don't pay enough attention, but I don't really recall that many. Walter Bright is the primary name that jumps to mind, and I'm actually having trouble coming up with many others.

I've seen Rust contributors comment here, but similarly don't think it's a particularly long list.

Well, I've seen contributors and core team people from .NET (and Azure), Java, Go, Rust, Arc (well, duh), Haskell, Clojure, Julia, Coffeescript and lots of other languages...

Some of them on a regular basis (Rust and Go people especially), others frequently pop up when their languages are discussed.

OK, now that you mention it, I do recall the Rust folks. Some of the others I don't remember, but I'm sure you're right. I probably just don't pay enough attention to that sort of thing. :-)

Well, I as Groovy Core don't follow hacker news normally. There are already enough channels for me to follow and the density of Groovy related themes has been quite low here. It as a thing of trying to spend the little time I have with something useful and being effective about it. So if I answer here, then only because someone pointed me to it and then it is more to try to fight misinformation and FUD

They are mostly Europeans and it is late Saturday night, so I'd cut them some slack. I'll post on Twitter and see if they can respond when the wake up on Sunday.

No, I mean I don't recall seeing them ever.

Two of the despots posted something under their own names 2 yrs ago. I think, though, that one of the Pivotal employees frequently posts under various different usernames.

Guess I am one of the ones from 2 yrs ago, even though I am not aware this has already been 2 yrs. I thought last time was already last year... well, I can be easily mistaken. But I really wonder what those Pivotal accounts are supposed to be. Could be a reason to talk with some people if I had details

You can check chronological comments from a certain user at, say, https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=blackdrag or https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=glaforge . I was just answering someone else's query when I mentioned that.

Most users on Hacker News use pseudonyms to better avoid the problems possible with having an online presence anywhere, though not all of us can be bothered. I suspect one regular commenter here, though, is associated with the Groovy/Grails developers at Pivotal.

Guillaume Laforge and Jochen Theodorou actually comment a bit. There are probably others whose github and HN user names I can't guess as easily.

It was more popular a few years ago.

Back in 2009, Grails was the big theme in many JUGs in Germany.

We even added Groovy support to our JSF internal SDK as a means to buy into the "has Groovy support" checklist.

Nowadays, if it wasn't for Graddle, I guess it would be just maintenance related projects. At least from what I see as JUG talks.

FWIW, almost everything we are doing at Fogbeam is Groovy (and Grails) based. I will agree that Groovy isn't as "trendy" as it was a couple of years ago, but it still seems to be progressing, and it's worked amazingly well for us. Personally, I'm a huge fan of both Groovy and Grails.

Could you give examples of recent terrible communications from the developers? I use Grails - based on Groovy - and I feel like I've been in the loop.

After posting my comment, Cedric Champeau has since posted an announcement [1] to the users mailing list, giving the reason for the delay: "official Groovy support wasn't decided until GR8Conf, where I wanted to show a prototype". So it seems nowadays only Groovy developers who pay to attend their conferences are polled when making decisions. Those who "only" follow the mailing lists are ignored.

[1] http://groovy.329449.n5.nabble.com/You-can-now-write-Android...

I agree that the mailing list should have been used the same day, but are you seriously unhappy that something is announced on the mailing list with a delay of 4 days, where all of these days had been travel, conference or holiday for any of the core members?

So what's the appropriate communication way for this? I am curious to know how that should have been done

Let's talk about the docs. The Groovy website docs (the "official docs") have some pages that are years out of date.

Let's look at the main tutorial, Groovy in Action. The first edition came out in 2007. In 2009, they began work on the 2nd ed. IT IS STILL NOT AVAILABLE except as an "early release book" [1]

What mystifies me in all this is that Groovy is a language with a company behind it. How can they not have made more than such a feeble attempt to provide current docs?

[1] http://www.manning.com/koenig2/

You might be familiar with last year's Groovy Conundrum in Dr Dobb's magazine...

"For all its strengths, however, Groovy suffered from several important drawbacks: the first and most painful was performance. It was slow — even for a dynamic language. The second limitation was that Groovy had no real design philosophy, save for a wide-ranging pragmatism. Any new feature that brightened enough eyes in the community got thrown in. So the language grew organically in ways that were hard to predict, rather than having a clear philosophy and a long-term trajectory. Finally, there was the problem that I believe most cramped its acceptance: limited documentation. There was one "Bible" and a pair of tutorials that rehashed the basics."

http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy-conundrum/240147731

Have you helped improve the docs? It is an open source project.

When you say improve, you should ask why the docs are broken in the first place.

I wrote a lot of doco for Groovy over 5 yrs ago, but it has a tendency to break between different versions of Groovy. E.g. this doco http://groovy.codehaus.org/JN2515-Closures I wrote stopped working after Groovy 1.5 because the Groovy despots suddenly decided to disallow try statements without a catch or finally clause for Groovy 1.6. I had to go through all my code and add finally{} throughout it all. I put the root problem down to the despots not taking work on the Groovy language spec (JSR-241) seriously.

I'm a Groovy user and I find that the Groovy developers -- who mostly work for Pivotal and host the project on Codehaus -- do a good job of communicating their roadmap and proposed features.

2.4 is a surprise to me. but a pleasant surprise and likely a release enabled by an unexpected breakthrough by Cedric Champeau.

Even if Groovy 3 had its first beta tomorrow, it would take several months for it to become the new 3.0. That has been the case for every Groovy version with a beta and especially for a version with so many changes as 3.0. Also the bigger the changes in 3.0 the longer there will be a Groovy 2.x. You can't expect to have 2.x maintained for, for example a year and have only bugfix versions coming out.