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.

PHP released 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35 to fix two critical vulnerabilities allowing unauthenticated remote code execution. Amazon recorded an exploitation attempt four days before the patches shipped, and operators spent the day working out whether they ran PHP, where to get the package, and how to tell it had landed.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
Google and Meta open-sourced TorchTPU, a native PyTorch backend for Google's TPUs, at PyTorch Conference North America 2026, and Meta said it plans to move larger LLM workloads onto TPUs with it. AWS released TorchNeuron for Trainium the same week, while developers questioned TPU availability and where vendor lock-in now sits.
By Andrew Hoblitzell
Google has released ML Drift, an open-source, cross-platform GPU compute engine designed for on-device AI and machine learning inference. Licensed under Apache 2.0, it abstracts the complexities of different GPU hardware and low-level APIs, supporting OpenGL ES, OpenCL, Metal, and WebGPU.
By Sergio De Simone
PingCAP recently confirmed unauthorized access to its internal systems and the theft of source code and customer-related data. The attacker, cyber extortion group FulcrumSec, claimed to have stolen 10.6 TB of data, including TiDB Cloud control-plane records, customer SQL statements, API keys, connection logs, billing information, internal documents, and 413 private source-code repositories.
By Renato Losio
Google explained how an 11-hour unattended run of Gemini 4 Argon produced two accepted optimizations for Google Agent Development Kit's codebase, reducing in-memory session-preparation overhead by about 40% in long sessions and cold package import time by 21%.
By Sergio De Simone
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
Powered by
You need to be a member of Codetown to add comments!
Join Codetown