I’ve been digging a lot into the Java world in the last few months at work. Not Java specifically, because the language still bugs me. Why does Java bug me? Honestly at this point my disdain for Java is more a habit than anything based on reality. I just don’t enjoy the language.
The JVM is a completely different beast. There has been an explosion of excellent languages written for the JVM platform over the last few years, and I have been playing with quite a few of them. Heck, I’m even using JRuby and Groovy at work. It’s obvious why I like JRuby: it’s an excellent implementation of Ruby, which I’m already familiar with. Groovy is a little more interesting. It’s very similar to basic Java, but includes closures, dynamic typing, and a fair amount of syntactic sugar. I like syntactic sugar. Groovy has proved itself to be an effective glue language for a lot of the things we’ve got going on, and tools like Gant (an excellent Groovy-based wrapper around Ant) are making my work life in the dreaded Java environment almost pleasant.
But this is the first I’ve really shared my love, because people often think of Perl when I use terms like “glue language” and “syntactic sugar.” I’m a Perl lover. I don’t see any problem with the comparison. I am willing to accept that “Perl” is a dirty word in this particular region of the programming world, though. Oh well.
I need to get back to work now, but I just had to share these thoughts with you. It’s been nearly a year since I said anything on this blog. Might as well say something.
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Added to vault 2024-01-15. Updated on 2024-01-26