On 22/03/2019 03:37, Thibault Kruse wrote:
On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 11:03 AM MG <mg...@arscreat.com> wrote:
Maybe I am missing something, but it seems to me that Jetbrains could have put
their weight behind Groovy, especially its static part, gaining all the
benefits with regards to tool support / Intellisense they now claim for Kotlin
I believe in this 2016 article Cedric had explained in good detail why
this is not a mere matter of Jetbrains putting more weight behind
anything:
http://melix.github.io/blog/2016/05/gradle-kotlin.html
I have read Cédric's post several times back then, and have reread it
now, and to me it says exactly that: It would have been possible to do
this in Groovy, just not by Cédric alone; e.g.:
"Does it make sense [to support Groovy in addition to Kotlin] ? Now that
we made the decision to support Kotlin, that we proved it would provide
the level of user friendliness we want and that it is statically
compiled by default, does it make sense to put resources to support
static Groovy in addition? I don’t have an answer to this. I thought
yes, but now I’m not sure. Kotlin does the job. And honestly, they have
great engineers working on the language."
In addition it has been confirmed here by other Groovy stalwarts that
Gradle wanted changes in (the static part of) Groovy, which the project
just could not deliver with the manpower available. Jetbrains had a
choice, and they decided to go along the Kotlin route, and they offered
that plus excellent IDE support to the Gradle people, who took it. As I
have said before: Commercially all completely understandable - but at
the same time it put them in direct competition with Groovy, with the
fact that IntelliJ is the IDE for Groovy development making matters
infinitely more complicated.
I know we are all upset by Cédric taking this step, but it has evidently
been on his mind the last years, as can be seen in the same post from
2016 (and imho multiple posts on this mailing list):
"This leads me to what I should do. And there, I’m a bit lost, to be
honest. I work for a company that embraced Groovy, that is now embracing
Kotlin. I love my job, I love working with Gradle, I love Groovy, and I
quite enjoy Kotlin. I’m a passionate developer. I just want to continue
having fun. But if you think that as such, I’m not a good representative
of the Groovy community anymore, maybe I should step off from the Groovy
project."
Cheers,
mg
