Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Slightly modified from original post: http://adamldavis.com/
There’s a hot new programming language that I’m excited about. It can be used dynamically or statically-typed, your choice. It supports functional programming constructs, including first-class functions, currying, and more. It has multiple-inheritance, type inference, and meta-programming. It also integrates really well with a battle-tested enterprise-worthy language and best-of-class virtual machine.
This programming language actually isn’t that new. It’s from 2004, but they’ve recently added a lot of new features, such as traits. Oh, did I mention it has a great community and tons of frameworks built on top of it for web-applications, testing, and even full build systems. This language is great for building DSL’s and is very light-weight. Oh, and it can be compiled to JavaScript and it can be used to develop for Android.
As you might have guessed, this language is called “Groovy”. The virtual machine it’s built on is the JVM, the web framework is Grails, the testing framework is spock, and the build system is Gradle.
As you may have heard, Pivotal has dropped its Groovy/Grails support. Although some will take this news as sky-falling bad news, I actually think it’s the opposite. Pivotal only "acquired" the developers behind Groovy and Grails through a “Russian nesting doll” turn of events. In short, SpringSource bought G2One then Pivotal bought SpringSource (and VMWare goes in there somewhere).
There are tons of companies that stand to benefit from Groovy that could take up its funding: Google, Oracle, and Gradleware come to mind.
Groovy has a lot going for it. With projects like ratpack, grooscript, gradle, and others, its future looks bright.
Also: Grails has improved dramatically and will support microservices much better in the next release (3) among other improvements.
Update: Groovy Moving to a Foundation
Comment
Update: Groovy stewardship is moving to the Apache Software Foundation.
Here's a great article by Cédric Champeau (one of the developers behind Groovy) on Groovy's history and who has contributed to it over the years: http://melix.github.io/blog/2015/02/who-is-groovy.html
Clarification: Groovy and Grails are open-source projects. I used the short-hand "acquired" to describe Pivotal's hiring of the developers behind Groovy and Grails. Groovy and Grails development would continue even if no one hires these developers, just at a slower pace.
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.
Jonathan Lowe explains how to connect an LLM directly to a structured graph database using a rapid prototype. He demonstrates how to use sentence embeddings and semantic search to allow natural language queries to retrieve and analyze structured data. This approach enables a local LLM to answer complex questions by leveraging the relationships within a knowledge graph.
By Jonathan LowePinterest has introduced PinConsole, a unified internal developer platform (IDP) that centralizes engineering workflows. Built to address fragmented tools for deployment, monitoring, and service management, PinConsole provides a consistent layer that lets engineers focus on business logic instead of infrastructure complexity.
By Leela KumiliLinkedIn extended its generative AI application platform to support multi-agent systems by repurposing its existing messaging infrastructure as an orchestration layer. This allowed the company to scale AI agents without building new coordination technology from scratch and achieve global availability while supporting complex multi-step workflows through agent coordination.
By Eran StillerIn this episode, Suhail Patel joins Thomas Betts for a discussion about growing yourself as your company grows. When he started at Monzo, Patel was one of four engineers on the then new platform team–there are now over 100 people. The conversation covers how to thrive when the company and the systems you’re building are going through major growth.
By Suhail PatelHugging Face has unveiled FinePDFs, the largest publicly available corpus built entirely from PDFs. The dataset spans 475 million documents in 1,733 languages, totaling roughly 3 trillion tokens. At 3.65 terabytes in size, FinePDFs introduces a new dimension to open training datasets by tapping into a resource long considered too complex and expensive to process.
By Robert Krzaczyński
© 2025 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown